Computational Neuroscience of Language Processing in the Human Brain

NCT05222594 | Recruiting

• 1 other identifier: 2020P001989
• Study Type: interventional
• Target: 40
• Locations: 1 country
• Sites: 1

Brief Summary

Language is a signature human cognitive skill, but the precise computations that support language understanding remain unknown. This study aims to combine high-quality human neural data obtained through intracranial recordings with advances in computational modeling of human cognition to shed light on the construction and understanding of speech.

Conditions

Epilepsy; Language

Keywords

language; computational neuroscience; epilepsy

Outcome Measures

Primary Outcomes (3)

• Cortical maps of linguistic responses

  By using sEEG intracranial recordings of the brain, EEG power in frequency bands will reflect cortical maps of responses to different linguistic manipulations, informing the functional organization of the human language system. Power is measured in arbitrary units; higher power reflects greater activity at the investigated frequency.

  Throughout intracranial monitoring period, up to approximately 10 days

• Neural time-courses during naturalistic language comprehension

  Time-courses of neural response to language across diverse parts of the language network. These data will be used to predict across-time variation in response strength from the properties of linguistic input.

  Throughout intracranial monitoring period, up to approximately 10 days

• Brain scores for diverse artificial neural network (ANN) language models

  Human neural data will be compared to ANN language models to test how well these models predict human responses to language and why. There are no minimum or maximum scores. Higher values mean better model predictivity (i.e., a better match between model representations and neural responses).

  Throughout intracranial monitoring period, up to approximately 10 days

Study Arms (1)

Epileptic participants undergoing intracranial monitoring

OTHER

Patients with pharmaco-resistant epilepsy undergoing intracranial monitoring involving the left cerebral hemisphere.

Other: Behavioral tasks during intracranial monitoring

Interventions

Behavioral tasks during intracranial monitoring OTHER

Participants will listen to sentences and stories while neural data are recorded through electrodes placed for clinical purposes.

Epileptic participants undergoing intracranial monitoring

Eligibility Criteria

• Age: 18 Years - 85 Years
• Sex: all
• Healthy Volunteers: No
• Age Groups: Adult (18-64), Older Adult (65+)

You may qualify if:

• clinical indications to proceed with intracranial monitoring involving the left cerebral hemisphere, as determined by a multidisciplinary epilepsy surgery team
• the ability to comply with test directions and provide informed consent
• between ages 18 - 85

You may not qualify if:

• inability to understand or perform the task outlined in the protocol, or who are unwilling or unable to participate

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Massachusetts Institute of Technology: collaborator
• Massachusetts General Hospital: lead

Study Sites (1)

Massachusetts General Hospital

Boston, Massachusetts, 02114, United States

RECRUITING

Related Publications (14)

• Blank I, Balewski Z, Mahowald K, Fedorenko E. Syntactic processing is distributed across the language system. Neuroimage. 2016 Feb 15;127:307-323. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2015.11.069. Epub 2015 Dec 5.

  PMID: 26666896 BACKGROUND

• Blank IA, Fedorenko E. No evidence for differences among language regions in their temporal receptive windows. Neuroimage. 2020 Oct 1;219:116925. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2020.116925. Epub 2020 May 11.

  PMID: 32407994 BACKGROUND

• Fedorenko E, Behr MK, Kanwisher N. Functional specificity for high-level linguistic processing in the human brain. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2011 Sep 27;108(39):16428-33. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1112937108. Epub 2011 Sep 1.

  PMID: 21885736 BACKGROUND

• Fedorenko E, Blank IA. Broca's Area Is Not a Natural Kind. Trends Cogn Sci. 2020 Apr;24(4):270-284. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2020.01.001. Epub 2020 Feb 20.

  PMID: 32160565 BACKGROUND

• Fedorenko E, Duncan J, Kanwisher N. Language-selective and domain-general regions lie side by side within Broca's area. Curr Biol. 2012 Nov 6;22(21):2059-62. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2012.09.011. Epub 2012 Oct 11.

  PMID: 23063434 BACKGROUND

• Fedorenko E, Hsieh PJ, Nieto-Castanon A, Whitfield-Gabrieli S, Kanwisher N. New method for fMRI investigations of language: defining ROIs functionally in individual subjects. J Neurophysiol. 2010 Aug;104(2):1177-94. doi: 10.1152/jn.00032.2010. Epub 2010 Apr 21.

  PMID: 20410363 BACKGROUND

• Fedorenko E, Nieto-Castanon A, Kanwisher N. Lexical and syntactic representations in the brain: an fMRI investigation with multi-voxel pattern analyses. Neuropsychologia. 2012 Mar;50(4):499-513. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2011.09.014. Epub 2011 Sep 17.

  PMID: 21945850 BACKGROUND

• Fedorenko E, Scott TL, Brunner P, Coon WG, Pritchett B, Schalk G, Kanwisher N. Neural correlate of the construction of sentence meaning. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2016 Oct 11;113(41):E6256-E6262. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1612132113. Epub 2016 Sep 26.

  PMID: 27671642 BACKGROUND

• Mollica F, Siegelman M, Diachek E, Piantadosi ST, Mineroff Z, Futrell R, Kean H, Qian P, Fedorenko E. Composition is the Core Driver of the Language-selective Network. Neurobiol Lang (Camb). 2020 Mar 1;1(1):104-134. doi: 10.1162/nol_a_00005. eCollection 2020.

  PMID: 36794007 BACKGROUND

• Nieto-Castanon A, Fedorenko E. Subject-specific functional localizers increase sensitivity and functional resolution of multi-subject analyses. Neuroimage. 2012 Nov 15;63(3):1646-69. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2012.06.065. Epub 2012 Jul 8.

  PMID: 22784644 BACKGROUND

• Norman-Haignere S, Kanwisher NG, McDermott JH. Distinct Cortical Pathways for Music and Speech Revealed by Hypothesis-Free Voxel Decomposition. Neuron. 2015 Dec 16;88(6):1281-1296. doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2015.11.035.

  PMID: 26687225 BACKGROUND

• Pereira F, Lou B, Pritchett B, Ritter S, Gershman SJ, Kanwisher N, Botvinick M, Fedorenko E. Toward a universal decoder of linguistic meaning from brain activation. Nat Commun. 2018 Mar 6;9(1):963. doi: 10.1038/s41467-018-03068-4.

  PMID: 29511192 BACKGROUND

• Shain C, Blank IA, van Schijndel M, Schuler W, Fedorenko E. fMRI reveals language-specific predictive coding during naturalistic sentence comprehension. Neuropsychologia. 2020 Feb 17;138:107307. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2019.107307. Epub 2019 Dec 24.

  PMID: 31874149 BACKGROUND

• Siegelman M, Blank IA, Mineroff Z, Fedorenko E. An Attempt to Conceptually Replicate the Dissociation between Syntax and Semantics during Sentence Comprehension. Neuroscience. 2019 Aug 10;413:219-229. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroscience.2019.06.003. Epub 2019 Jun 11.

  PMID: 31200104 BACKGROUND

MeSH Terms

Conditions

Language; Epilepsy

Condition Hierarchy (Ancestors)

Communication; Behavior; Brain Diseases; Central Nervous System Diseases; Nervous System Diseases

Central Study Contacts

Evelina Fedorenko, PhD

CONTACT

617-258-0670; evelina9@mit.edu

Study Design

• Study Type: interventional
• Phase: not applicable
• Allocation: NA
• Masking: NONE
• Purpose: BASIC SCIENCE
• Intervention Model: SINGLE GROUP
• Sponsor Type: OTHER
• Responsible Party: PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR
• PI Title: Director, Functional Neurosurgery

Study Record Dates

• First Submitted: January 24, 2022
• First Posted: February 3, 2022
• Study Start: April 2, 2021
• Primary Completion: March 31, 2026
• Study Completion: March 31, 2026
• Last Updated: January 20, 2026

Record last verified: 2026-01

Data Sharing

• IPD Sharing: Will not share

Locations

US (1)