Spatio-temporal Characteristics of Noun and Verb Processing during Sentence Comprehension in the Brain

Our experiments reveal that nouns and verbs read early in the sentence have a varying influence on neural activity while reading subsequent words, decreasing and increasing at particular word positions in active and passively voiced sentences, with particularly important contributions to activity in frontal and temporal cortical regions. We find the noun and verb information to be decodable from the neural activity for several seconds after sentence reading has completed. Our exploration is also the first to study the effect of question-answering task on the neural representation of the words post-sentence. We are releasing our 300 sentence MEG dataset to encourage further research in this important area.