Do speakers of various languages construct sentence structures in the same way? A neuroimaging study featured in PLOS Biology by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, the Donders Institute, and Radboud University in Nijmegen explored this question by recording the brain activity of participants as they listened to Dutch stories. Unlike in English, where a more passive ‘wait-and-see’ tactic is employed, Dutch sentence comprehension relies more on an anticipatory strategy that predicts upcoming elements. This indicates that different languages may utilize distinct approaches to processing sentences.
When people listen to spoken language, they must connect their ‘abstract’ grammatical knowledge with the actual words they hear. Existing theories about real-time grammatical structure development are frequently centered around English. For instance, in a sentence like ‘I have watched a documentary,’ the noun ‘documentary’ comes right after the verb. However, in Dutch, the order can be inverted: ‘Ik heb een documentaire gezien’ translates to ‘I have a documentary watched.’
“To discern whether different language speakers construct grammatical structures similarly, it’s essential to examine languages that differ from English in intriguing ways,” stated lead author Cas Coopmans. “Conclusions drawn from English may not apply to languages with distinct grammatical features, like Dutch.”
Audiobook stories
To delve into how individuals form sentence structures in Dutch, the researchers monitored the brain activity of 24 participants who listened to Dutch audiobooks while in a magnetoencephalography (MEG) scanner.
For each word in the audiobook, the researchers assessed the extent of grammatical information that could be derived. They contrasted a ‘top-down’ strategy, which revolves around predicting sentence structure early, with a ‘bottom-up’ approach that integrates grammatical information at a later stage.
Predicting what comes next
Both strategies for constructing sentences were able to predict activity in the key language areas of the brain’s left hemisphere, but the predictive approach showed significantly stronger effects.
While English speakers seem to favor a ‘wait-and-see’ strategy, Dutch speakers are more inclined to adopt a predictive method for sentence construction. This demonstrates that grammatical structure development during language comprehension varies between languages.
The researchers plan to extend their study to investigate additional languages and how different linguistic characteristics play a role. “With the understanding that we can utilize this technique to examine how individuals build grammatical structure during natural spoken language comprehension, we can explore how this process is shaped by other linguistic elements. In future research, we aim to explore the brain’s potential use of speech’s prosodic features to decode the grammatical structure of spoken phrases,” Coopmans explained.
