iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Nigel Flower

Stanislas Dehaene @standehaene.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

A fundamental discovery ! Immanuel Kant would have loved it.

Nigel Flower @nigelflower.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

These findings align with hemodynamic work showing shared lexico-semantic and syntactic sensitivity, and with theories that unify word and sentence structure. They also suggest that serial combinatory processing can emerge even without temporal structure.

020

Nigel Flower @nigelflower.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

We found that the waveforms of the words, phrases, and sentences did not fundamentally differ from each other, challenging models that privilege Furthermore, we find that combinatory processing in the LATL unfolds sequentially from the leftmost bigram to the right.

130

Nigel Flower @nigelflower.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

Could it be that words, phrases, and sentences all move through the same neural processing stages? To test this, we used MEG while participants viewed stimuli ranging from single words ("all") to full sentences ("all cats are nice"), presented simultaneously.

100

Nigel Flower @nigelflower.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

A curious finding from recent reading research: the brain's response to a full sentence looks surprisingly similar to its response to a single word. If words must be processed before they can be combined into sentences, why would their neural signatures look so alike?

100

Nigel Flower @nigelflower.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

📢 New paper out in Neurobiology of Language! Using MEG, we found that the brain's responses to full sentences are strikingly similar to those elicited by single words. Our results suggest a "global-to-sequential" process: first a snapshot of structure, then left-to-right composition.

direct.mit.edu

A Unified Neural Time Course for Words, Phrases, and Sentences: MEG Evidence from Parallel Presentation

Abstract. Recent behavioral and neural research on reading shows that humans can extract syntactic structure from short sentences within a fraction of a second—faster than many estimates for recognizi...

1134

Nigel Flower @nigelflower.bsky.social · 12/01/2026

Our results link neural mechanisms to semantic theories of quantification (like Restricted Quantification). This helps bridge formal linguistics and neurobiology of language.

030

Nigel Flower @nigelflower.bsky.social · 12/01/2026

This suggests that the brain represents aspects of quantifier meaning that are not explicitly represented in canonical theories of quantifier semantics.

130

Nigel Flower @nigelflower.bsky.social · 12/01/2026

🧠 We found that activity in the LATL tracks whether a determiner expresses a referential domain — that is, how a set of individuals is mentally represented — rather than a simple logical intersection of sets.

110

Nigel Flower @nigelflower.bsky.social · 12/01/2026

We used MEG with rapid parallel visual presentation of quantified sentences (e.g., “all cats are nice” vs. “some cats are nice”) to isolate brain signals linked to quantifier processing.

100

Nigel Flower @nigelflower.bsky.social · 12/01/2026

Quantifiers are everywhere in language — but understanding how the brain builds their meaning has been difficult because their interpretation depends on entire sentence contexts. These aren’t just words — they shape meaning structures.

100

Nigel Flower @nigelflower.bsky.social · 12/01/2026

🚀 New paper out now in Cognition! In it, we show how the left anterior temporal lobe (LATL) contributes to interpreting quantifiers like all, some, and no during language comprehension. doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106403

doi.org

Redirecting

1122