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Liina Pylkkänen / How do our brains order syntactic and semantic computations when no temporal order is imposed from the input?

Close portrait of a woman, smiling. You know who it is? It's Liina Pylkkänen, Professor of Linguistics at NYU.

Liina Pylkkänen / How do our brains order syntactic and semantic computations when no temporal order is imposed from the input?

Linguistics | Maryland Language Science Center Friday, May 9, 2025 3:00 pm - 4:30 pm

May 9, our colloquium welcomes Liina Pylkkänen, Professor of Linguistics and Psychology at NYU, who will discuss her work on how language is processed when temporal ordering is factored out, through rapid parallel visual presentation. Her abstract is below. 

Language can be expressed and received through various modalities, such as sound, sight, and touch. Each modality has its own temporal dynamics, including different degrees of serialism and parallelism. In the neurobiology of language, we are limited by the fact that for each study, we must choose some specific modality. This hinders our ability to discern whether the observed results stem from properties of language or modality-specific dynamics. Comparing modalities directly is a slow way to uncover any inherent modality independent organization within the language system. In this talk, I discuss new work in which we approach this question from a different angle and ask: How does the language system organize itself when the input lacks temporal sequencing, allowing the brain to order computations in whatever way is natural? That organization should be a useful window into the brain’s inherent way to travel from form to meaning. We present short written sentences all at once, quickly enough to eliminate eye movements, in so-called rapid parallel visual presentation (RPVP; Snell & Grainger, 2017). We use magnetoencephalography (MEG) to reveal the neural organization of syntactic and semantic computations for parallel visual language input. Our initial results show that in a simple matching task, grammatical sentences in RPVP drive increased neural activity in left fronto-temporal cortex starting at ~130ms after sentence onset as compared to word lists. By varying the linguistic properties of the sentences, we aim to characterize the spatiotemporal organization of syntactic and semantic computations for a stimulus that does not itself impose any order. Further, since a parallel stimulus does not unfold over time, it gives us a measure of how input is mapped to knowledge in the absence of predictions from a temporally preceding context.

Add to Calendar 05/09/25 15:00:00 05/09/25 16:30:00 America/New_York Liina Pylkkänen / How do our brains order syntactic and semantic computations when no temporal order is imposed from the input?

May 9, our colloquium welcomes Liina Pylkkänen, Professor of Linguistics and Psychology at NYU, who will discuss her work on how language is processed when temporal ordering is factored out, through rapid parallel visual presentation. Her abstract is below. 

Language can be expressed and received through various modalities, such as sound, sight, and touch. Each modality has its own temporal dynamics, including different degrees of serialism and parallelism. In the neurobiology of language, we are limited by the fact that for each study, we must choose some specific modality. This hinders our ability to discern whether the observed results stem from properties of language or modality-specific dynamics. Comparing modalities directly is a slow way to uncover any inherent modality independent organization within the language system. In this talk, I discuss new work in which we approach this question from a different angle and ask: How does the language system organize itself when the input lacks temporal sequencing, allowing the brain to order computations in whatever way is natural? That organization should be a useful window into the brain’s inherent way to travel from form to meaning. We present short written sentences all at once, quickly enough to eliminate eye movements, in so-called rapid parallel visual presentation (RPVP; Snell & Grainger, 2017). We use magnetoencephalography (MEG) to reveal the neural organization of syntactic and semantic computations for parallel visual language input. Our initial results show that in a simple matching task, grammatical sentences in RPVP drive increased neural activity in left fronto-temporal cortex starting at ~130ms after sentence onset as compared to word lists. By varying the linguistic properties of the sentences, we aim to characterize the spatiotemporal organization of syntactic and semantic computations for a stimulus that does not itself impose any order. Further, since a parallel stimulus does not unfold over time, it gives us a measure of how input is mapped to knowledge in the absence of predictions from a temporally preceding context.

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