Study says sentences have their own connection in the brain

A new study finds that incoming speech sounds are connected by our brain to our knowledge of grammar, which is quite abstract in nature. A group of researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Psycholinguistics and Radboud University in Nijmegen discovered that the brain encodes the structure of sentences and phrases into various neural firing patterns. Lise Meitner Group Leader Andrea Martin already had a theory on how the brain computes linguistic structure, based on evidence from computer simulations. In a collaboration with first author and PhD candidate Fan Bai and MPI director Antje Meyer, she set out to investigate whether the brain responds differently to sentences and phrases, and if this could hint at how the brain encodes abstract structure. "Our findings show how the brain separates speech into linguistic structure by using the timing and connectivity of neural firing patterns.