Composition is the core driver of the language-selective network

Abstract

The frontotemporal language network responds robustly and selectively to sentences. But the features of linguistic input that drive this response and the computations that these language areas support remain debated. Two key features of sentences are typically confounded in natural linguistic input: words in sentences (a) are semantically and syntactically combinable into phrase- and clause-level meanings, and (b) occur in an order licensed by the language’s grammar. Inspired by recent psycholinguistic work establishing that language processing is robust to word order violations, we hypothesized that the core linguistic computation is composition, and, thus, can take place even when the word order violates the grammatical constraints of the language. This hypothesis predicts that a linguistic string should elicit a sentence-level response in the language network provided that the words in that string can enter into dependency relationships as in typical sentences. We tested this prediction across two fMRI experiments (total N = 47) by introducing a varying number of local word swaps into naturalistic sentences, leading to progressively less syntactically well-formed strings. Critically, local dependency relationships were preserved because combinable words remained close to each other. As predicted, word order degradation did not decrease the magnitude of the blood oxygen level–dependent response in the language network, except when combinable words were so far apart that composition among nearby words was highly unlikely. This finding demonstrates that composition is robust to word order violations, and that the language regions respond as strongly as they do to naturalistic linguistic input, providing that composition can take place.