Pronouns reactivate conceptual representations in human hippocampal neurons

During discourse comprehension, every new word adds to an evolving representation of meaning that accumulates over consecutive sentences and constrains the next words. To minimize repetition and utterance length, languages use pronouns, like the word "she," to refer to nouns and phrases th...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science) Vol. 385; no. 6716; pp. 1478 - 1484
Main Authors:	Dijksterhuis, D E, Self, M W, Possel, J K, Peters, J C, van Straaten, E C W, Idema, S, Baaijen, J C, van der Salm, S M A, Aarnoutse, E J, van Klink, N C E, van Eijsden, P, Hanslmayr, S, Chelvarajah, R, Roux, F, Kolibius, L D, Sawlani, V, Rollings, D T, Dehaene, S, Roelfsema, P R
Format:	Journal Article
Language:	English
Published:	United States The American Association for the Advancement of Science 27-09-2024
Subjects:	Adult Comprehension Female Hippocampus Hippocampus - cytology Hippocampus - physiology Humans Language Male Memory - physiology Neurons - physiology Reading Representations Semantics
Online Access:	Get full text
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Summary:	During discourse comprehension, every new word adds to an evolving representation of meaning that accumulates over consecutive sentences and constrains the next words. To minimize repetition and utterance length, languages use pronouns, like the word "she," to refer to nouns and phrases that were previously introduced. It has been suggested that language comprehension requires that pronouns activate the same neuronal representations as the nouns themselves. We recorded from individual neurons in the human hippocampus during a reading task. Cells that were selective to a particular noun were later reactivated by pronouns that refer to the cells' preferred noun. These results imply that concept cells contribute to a rapid and dynamic semantic memory network that is recruited during language comprehension.
Bibliography:	ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23
ISSN:	0036-8075 1095-9203 1095-9203
DOI:	10.1126/science.adr2813