Entropy Reduction correlates with temporal lobe activity
Matthew Nelson, Stanislas Dehaene, Christophe Pallier, John Hale
Abstract
Using the Entropy Reduction incremental complexity metric, we relate high gamma power signals from the brains of epileptic patients to incremental stages of syntactic analysis in English and French. We find that signals recorded intracranially from the anterior Inferior Temporal Sulcus (aITS) and the posterior Inferior Temporal Gyrus (pITG) correlate with word-by-word Entropy Reduction values derived from phrase structure grammars for those languages. In the anterior region, this correlation persists even in combination with surprisal co-predictors from PCFG and ngram models. The result confirms the idea that the brain’s temporal lobe houses a parsing function, one whose incremental processing difficulty profile reflects changes in grammatical uncertainty.- Anthology ID:
- W17-0701
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics (CMCL 2017)
- Month:
- April
- Year:
- 2017
- Address:
- Valencia, Spain
- Editors:
- Ted Gibson, Tal Linzen, Asad Sayeed, Martin van Schijndel, William Schuler
- Venue:
- CMCL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 1–10
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/W17-0701
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/W17-0701
- Cite (ACL):
- Matthew Nelson, Stanislas Dehaene, Christophe Pallier, and John Hale. 2017. Entropy Reduction correlates with temporal lobe activity. In Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics (CMCL 2017), pages 1–10, Valencia, Spain. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Entropy Reduction correlates with temporal lobe activity (Nelson et al., CMCL 2017)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/W17-0701.pdf