Predicting "when" in discourse engages the human dorsal auditory stream: an fMRI study using naturalistic stories
File(s)
Published version
Author(s)
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
The hierarchical organisation of human cortical circuits integrates information across different timescales via temporal receptive windows (TRWs), which increase in length from lower to higher levels of the cortical hierarchy (Hasson et al., 2015). A recent neurobiological model of higher-order language processing (Bornkessel-Schlesewsky et al., 2015) posits that TRWs in the dorsal auditory stream provide the basis for a hierarchically organised predictive coding architecture (Friston and Kiebel, 2009). In this stream, a nested set of internal models generates time-based (“when”) predictions for upcoming input at different linguistic levels (sounds, words, sentences, discourse). Here, we used naturalistic stories to test the hypothesis that multi-sentence, discourse-level predictions are processed in the dorsal auditory stream, yielding attenuated blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) responses for highly predicted versus less strongly predicted language input. The results were as hypothesised: discourse-related cues such as passive voice, which effect a higher predictability of remention for a character at a later point within a story, led to attenuated BOLD responses for auditory input of high versus low predictability within the dorsal auditory stream, specifically in the inferior parietal lobule (IPL), middle frontal gyrus (MFG) and dorsal parts of the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) among other areas. Additionally, we found effects of content-related (“what”) predictions in ventral regions. These findings provide novel evidence that hierarchical predictive coding extends to discourse-level processing in natural language. Importantly, they ground language processing on a hierarchically organised predictive network, as a common underlying neurobiological basis shared with other brain functions.
Date Issued
2016-11-30
Date Acceptance
2016-09-13
Citation
Journal of Neuroscience, 2016, 36 (48), pp.12180-12191
ISSN
1529-2401
Publisher
Society for Neuroscience
Start Page
12180
End Page
12191
Journal / Book Title
Journal of Neuroscience
Volume
36
Issue
48
Copyright Statement
© 2016 Kandylaki et al. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium provided that the original work is properly attributed.
Subjects
Neurology & Neurosurgery
11 Medical And Health Sciences
17 Psychology And Cognitive Sciences
Publication Status
Published