Biology subjects

Krogh, S. M.

Publications and source records attributed to Krogh, S. M..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

When tigers are not animals: The neural disappearance of animacy as a function of linguistic structure

In language, not only do sentence meanings depend on how words are structured together, but word meanings also depend on their roles in the structure. While we have some understanding of how the brain grasps complex meanings built from simpler parts, we know far less about how linguistic structure reshapes the meanings of the words themselves. Here we used magnetoencephalography (29 human participants: 16 women, 9 men, 4 nonbinary) to track the neural dynamics of animacy, a fundamental semantic feature that guides conceptual organization. Regardless of how animacy was operationalized (as discrete semantic categories or more abstractly), the same pattern emerged: When word-level animacy conflicted with the structural context, it disappeared from the word's neural representation. Our findings show how compositional processes rapidly reconfigure neural traces of word meanings, allowing phrase-level meanings to even override word-level features.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2026

No tiger in plastic tiger: Local linguistic context alters the neural representations of individual words

Language is vastly ambiguous, yet in context our brains resolve ambiguity effortlessly. This is particularly evident at the lexical level: Although most words can convey a wide range of related meanings, humans rapidly and automatically select the one appropriate for the context. We investigated the neural mechanisms underlying this process by focusing on a case where, intuitively, one meaning appears more basic than another: nouns describing animate entities, such as tiger, which can also refer to representations of those entities when combined with a material modifier, as in plastic tiger. Using magnetoencephalography, we decoded animacy from neural signals and found that even in such cases, our approach revealed no evidence that the tiger in plastic tiger is represented as a sentient animal in any stage of processing. Instead, phrase-level animacy--plastic tiger as inanimate--was decodable as early as 210 ms post-stimulus onset and persisted for several hundred milliseconds. These findings challenge theories assuming a shift from a basic sense of a word to a more derived one, highlighting instead the role of compositional context in shaping word meanings.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2026

Comparing serial and parallel language input: Shared neural representations with distinct encoding strengths

Language can be experienced in highly serial form, as in speech, or in fully parallel form, as in text, yet how our brains adapt to differences in seriality is not understood. Here, we held modality constant (visual) and examined whether processing mechanisms underlying grammaticality detection are similar under Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) and Rapid Parallel Visual Presentation (RPVP). To identify shared neural representations of grammaticality, we trained a classifier on magnetoencephalography (MEG) responses to grammatical and ungrammatical three-word phrases in one presentation mode and tested its generalization to the other. Behaviorally, accuracy was higher and reaction times faster for grammatical vs. ungrammatical phrases across presentation modes. Neurally, cross-presentation decoding revealed shared representations of grammaticality at word 2 across train-test directions--albeit with different latencies and durations--and an early shared representation at word 3 when trained on RPVP. We take the bidirectional representations at word 2 to capture distinct but presentation-invariant combinatorial processes and the asymmetry at word 3 as reflecting stronger global structure encoding in RPVP.

neuroscience↗