Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Dissociating the neural correlates of the sociality and plausibility effects in simple conceptual combination

  • Original Article
  • Published:
Brain Structure and Function Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Neuroimaging studies have indicated that a brain network distributed in the supramodal cortical regions of the frontal, temporal, and parietal lobes plays a central role in conceptual processing. The activation of this network is modulated by two orthogonal dimensions in conceptual processing—the semantic features of individual concepts and the meaningfulness of conceptual combinations—but it remains unclear how the network is functionally organized along these two dimensions. In this fMRI study, we focused on two specific factors, i.e. the social semantic richness of words and the semantic plausibility of word combinations, along the two dimensions. In literature, the distributions of the effects of the two factors are very similar, but have not been rigorously compared in one study. We orthogonally manipulated the two factors in a phrase comprehension task and found a clear dissociation between their effects. The combination of these results with our previous findings reveals three adjacently distributed subnetworks of the supramodal semantic network, associated with the sociality effect, imageability effect, and semantic plausibility effect, respectively. Further analysis of the resting-state functional connectivity data indicated that the functional dissociation among the three subnetworks is associated with their underlying intrinsic connectivity structures.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. Supramodal cortical regions: cortical regions that receive multimodal input not dominated by any single modality (Binder and Desai 2011).

References

  • Ashburner J, Friston KJ (2005) Unified segmentation. Neuroimage 26(3):839–851

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Bemis DK, Pylkkänen L (2011) Simple composition: a magnetoencephalography investigation into the comprehension of minimal linguistic phrases. J Neurosci 31(8):2801–2814

    CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Bemis DK, Pylkkänen L (2013) Basic linguistic composition recruits the left anterior temporal lobe and left angular gyrus during both listening and reading. Cereb Cortex 23(8):1859–1873

    CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Binder JR, Conant LL, Humphries CJ, Fernandino L, Simons SB, Aguilar M, Desai RH (2016) Toward a brain-based componential semantic representation. Cogn Neuropsychol 33(3–4):130–174

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Binder JR, Desai RH (2011) The neurobiology of semantic memory. Trends Cogn Sci 15(11):527–536

    PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Binder JR, Desai RH, Graves WW, Conant LL (2009) Where is the semantic system? A critical review and meta-analysis of 120 functional neuroimaging studies. Cereb Cortex 19(12):2767–2796

    PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Blanco-Elorrieta E, Ferreira VS, Del Prato P, Pylkkänen L (2018) The priming of basic combinatory responses in MEG. Cognition 170:49–63

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Blank I, Balewski Z, Mahowald K, Fedorenko E (2016) Syntactic processing is distributed across the language system. Neuroimage 127:307–323

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Bonhage CE, Fiebach CJ, Bahlmann J, Mueller JL (2014) Brain signature of working memory for sentence structure: enriched encoding and facilitated maintenance. J Cogn Neurosci 26(8):1654–1671

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Boylan C, Trueswell JC, Thompson-Schill SL (2017) Relational vs. attributive interpretation of nominal compounds differentially engages angular gyrus and anterior temporal lobe. Brain Lang 169:8–21

    PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Chinese Linguistic Data Consortium (2003). [Chinese lexicon] (CLDC-LAC-2003-001) Beijing, China: Tsinghua University, State Key Laboratory of Intelligent Technology and Systems, and Chinese Academy of Sciences, Institute of Automation

  • Contreras JM, Banaji MR, Mitchell JP (2012) Dissociable neural correlates of stereotypes and other forms of semantic knowledge. Soc Cogn Affect Neursci 7(7):764–770

    Google Scholar 

  • Fernandino L, Binder JR, Desai RH, Pendl SL, Humphries CJ, Gross WL, Conant LL, Seidenberg MS (2016) Concept representation reflects multimodal abstraction: a framework for embodied semantics. Cereb Cortex 26(5):2018–2034

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Ferstl EC, Neumann J, Bogler C, von Cramon DY (2008) The extended language network: a meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies on text comprehension. Hum Brain Mapp 29(5):581–593

    PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Forgács B, Bohrn I, Baudewig J, Hofmann MJ, Pleh C, Jacobs AM (2012) Neural correlates of combinatorial semantic processing of literal and figurative noun noun compound words. Neuroimage 63(3):1432–1442

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Gallagher HL, Happe F, Brunswick N, Fletcher PC, Frith U, Frith CD (2000) Reading the mind in cartoons and stories: an fMRI study of 'theory of mind' in verbal and nonverbal tasks. Neuropsychologia 38(1):11–21

    CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Graves WW, Binder JR, Desai RH, Conant LL, Seidenberg MS (2010) Neural correlates of implicit and explicit combinatorial semantic processing. Neuroimage 53(2):638–646

    PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Hagoort P (2013) MUC (memory, unification, control) and beyond. Front Psychol 4:416

    PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Humphreys GF, Ralph MAL (2017) Mapping domain-selective and counterpointed domain-general higher cognitive functions in the lateral parietal cortex: evidence from fMRI comparisons of difficulty-varying semantic versus visuo-spatial tasks, and functional connectivity analyses. Cereb Cortex 27(8):4199–4212

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Humphries C, Binder JR, Medler DA, Liebenthal E (2006) Syntactic and semantic modulation of neural activity during auditory sentence comprehension. J Cogn Neurosci 18(4):665–679

    PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Huth AG, de Heer WA, Griffiths TL, Theunissen FE, Gallant JL (2016) Natural speech reveals the semantic maps that tile human cerebral cortex. Nature 532(7600):453–458

    PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Jung-Beeman M (2005) Bilateral brain processes for comprehending natural language. Trends Cogn Sci 9(11):512–518

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Lerner Y, Honey CJ, Silbert LJ, Hasson U (2011) Topographic mapping of a hierarchy of temporal receptive windows using a narrated story. J Neurosci 31(8):2906–2915

    CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Leslie AM (1994) Pretending and believing: issues in the theory of ToMM. Cognition 50(1–3):211–238

    CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Lin N, Bi YC, Zhao Y, Luo CM, Li XS (2015) The theory-of-mind network in support of action verb comprehension: evidence from an fMRI study. Brain Lang 141:1–10

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Lin N, Wang X, Xu Y, Hua H, Zhao Y, Li X (2018) Fine subdivisions of the semantic network supporting social and sensory–motor semantic processing. Cereb Cortex 28(8):2699–2710

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Lin N, Yu X, Zhao Y, Zhang M (2016) Functional anatomy of recognition of Chinese multi-character words: convergent evidence from effects of transposable nonwords, lexicality, and word frequency. PLoS ONE 11(2):e0149583

    PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Mahon BZ, Caramazza A (2009) Concepts and categories: a cognitive neuropsychological perspective. Annu Rev Psychol 60:27–51

    PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Martin A (2007) The representation of object concepts in the brain. Annu Rev Psychol 58:25–45

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Mattheiss SR, Levinson H, Graves WW (2018) Duality of function: activation for meaningless nonwords and semantic codes in the same brain areas. Cereb Cortex 28(7):2516–2524

    PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Mellem MS, Jasmin KM, Peng C, Martin A (2016) Sentence processing in anterior superior temporal cortex shows a social–emotional bias. Neuropsychologia 89:217–224

    PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Meyer ML, Spunt RP, Berkman ET, Taylor SE, Lieberman MD (2012) Evidence for social working memory from a parametric functional MRI study. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 109(6):1883–1888

    CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Meyer ML, Taylor SE, Lieberman MD (2015) Social working memory and its distinctive link to social cognitive ability: an fMRI study. Soc Cogn Affect Neursci 10(10):1338–1347

    Google Scholar 

  • Mitchell JP, Heatherton TF, Macrae CN (2002) Distinct neural systems subserve person and object knowledge. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 99(23):15238–15243

    CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Pallier C, Devauchelle AD, Dehaene S (2011) Cortical representation of the constituent structure of sentences. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 108(6):2522–2527

    CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Price AR, Bonner MF, Peelle JE, Grossman M (2015) Converging evidence for the neuroanatomic basis of combinatorial semantics in the angular gyrus. J Neurosci 35(7):3276–3284

    CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Pylkkänen L, Bemis DK, Elorrieta EB (2014) Building phrases in language production: an MEG study of simple composition. Cognition 133(2):371–384

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Pylkkänen L, Brennan J, Bemis DK (2011) Grounding the cognitive neuroscience of semantics in linguistic theory. Lang Cogn Proc 26(9):1317–1337

    Google Scholar 

  • Rice GE, Hoffman P, Binney RJ, Ralph MAL (2018) Concrete versus abstract forms of social concept: an fMRI comparison of knowledge about people versus social terms. Philos Trans R Soc B 373(1752):20170136

    Google Scholar 

  • Saxe R, Kanwisher N (2003) People thinking about thinking people: the role of the temporo-parietal junction in “theory of mind”. Neuroimage 19(4):1835–1842

    CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Saxe R, Wexler A (2005) Making sense of another mind: the role of the right temporo-parietal junction. Neuropsychologia 43(10):1391–1399

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Schurz M, Radua J, Aichhorn M, Richlan F, Perner J (2014) Fractionating theory of mind: a meta-analysis of functional brain imaging studies. Neurosci Biobehav Rev 42:9–34

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Shrout PE, Fleiss JL (1979) Intraclass correlations—uses in assessing rater reliability. Psychol Bull 86(2):420–428

    CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Silver NC, Dunlap WP (1987) Averaging correlation coefficients: should Fisher's z transformation be used? J Appl Psychol 72(1):146–148

    Google Scholar 

  • Song XW, Dong ZY, Long XY, Li SF, Zuo XN, Zhu CZ, He Y, Yan CG, Zang YF (2011) REST: a toolkit for resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging data processing. PLoS ONE 6(9):e25031

    CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Stowe LA, Broere CAJ, Paans AMJ, Wijers AA, Mulder G, Vaalburg W, Zwarts F (1998) Localizing components of a complex task: sentence processing and working memory. NeuroReport 9(13):2995–2999

    CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Tamir DI, Thornton MA, Contreras JM, Mitchell JP (2016) Neural evidence that three dimensions organize mental state representation: rationality, social impact, and valence. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 113(1):194–199

    CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Thompson CK, Bonakdarpour B, Fix SC, Blumenfeld HK, Parrish TB, Gitelman DR, Mesulam MM (2007) Neural correlates of verb argument structure processing. J Cogn Neurosci 19(11):1753–1767

    PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Thompson CK, Bonakdarpour B, Fix SF (2010) Neural mechanisms of verb argument structure processing in agrammatic aphasic and healthy age-matched listeners. J Cogn Neurosci 22(9):1993–2011

    PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Tzourio-Mazoyer N, Landeau B, Papathanassiou D, Crivello F, Etard O, Delcroix N, Mazoyer B, Joliot M (2002) Automated anatomical labeling of activations in SPM using a macroscopic anatomical parcellation of the MNI MRI single-subject brain. Neuroimage 15(1):273–289

    CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Vandenberghe R, Nobre AC, Price CJ (2002) The response of left temporal cortex to sentences. J Cogn Neurosci 14(4):550–560

    CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Wang X, Wang B, Bi Y (2019) Close yet independent: dissociation of social from valence and abstract semantic dimensions in the left anterior temporal lobe. Hum Brain Mapp 40(16):4759–4776

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Williams A, Reddigari S, Pylkkänen L (2017) Early sensitivity of left perisylvian cortex to relationality in nouns and verbs. Neuropsychologia 100:131–143

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Xia MR, Wang JH, He Y (2013) BrainNet viewer: a network visualization tool for human brain connectomics. PLoS ONE 8(7):e68910

    CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Xu J, Kemeny S, Park G, Frattali C, Braun A (2005) Language in context: emergent features of word, sentence, and narrative comprehension. Neuroimage 25(3):1002–1015

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Xu YW, Lin QX, Han ZZ, He Y, Bi YC (2016) Intrinsic functional network architecture of human semantic processing: modules and hubs. Neuroimage 132:542–555

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Yarkoni T, Barch DM, Gray JR, Conturo TE, Braver TS (2009) BOLD correlates of trial-by-trial reaction time variability in gray and white matter: a multi-study fMRI analysis. PLoS ONE 4(1):e4257

    PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Yeo BTT, Krienen FM, Sepulcre J, Sabuncu MR, Lashkari D, Hollinshead M, Roffman JL, Smoller JW, Zoller L, Polimeni JR, Fischl B, Liu HS, Buckner RL (2011) The organization of the human cerebral cortex estimated by intrinsic functional connectivity. J Neurophysiol 106(3):1125–1165

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Zahn R, Moll J, Krueger F, Huey ED, Garrido G, Grafman J (2007) Social concepts are represented in the superior anterior temporal cortex. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 104(15):6430–6435

    CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Zhang LM, Pylkkänen L (2015) The interplay of composition and concept specificity in the left anterior temporal lobe: an MEG study. Neuroimage 111:228–240

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Zhang LM, Pylkkänen L (2018) Composing lexical versus functional adjectives: evidence for uniformity in the left temporal lobe. Psychon Bull Rev 25(6):2309–2322

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant numbers: 31871105 and 31300842) and by CAS Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science. We thank Yu Wang for her help in the preparation of experiment and Xiaohong Yang for helpful discussions.

Funding

This study was funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant numbers: 31871105 and 31300842) and by CAS Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. CAS Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, Beijing, 100101, China

    Nan Lin, Guangyao Zhang, Meimei Zhang, Huimin Hua & Xingshan Li

  2. Department of Psychology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China

    Nan Lin, Guangyao Zhang, Huimin Hua & Xingshan Li

  3. Center for Mind/Brain Sciences (CIMeC), University of Trento, 38123, Trento, Italy

    Yangwen Xu

  4. International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA), 34136, Trieste, Italy

    Yangwen Xu

  5. National Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning and IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, 100875, China

    Huichao Yang

  6. National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, CASIA, Beijing, 100190, China

    Shaonan Wang

  7. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China

    Shaonan Wang

Authors
  1. Nan Lin
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Yangwen Xu
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Huichao Yang
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Guangyao Zhang
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  5. Meimei Zhang
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  6. Shaonan Wang
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  7. Huimin Hua
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  8. Xingshan Li
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Nan Lin.

Ethics declarations

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Ethical approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the Institutional Review Board of the Magnetic Resonance Imaging Research Center of the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Informed consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Electronic supplementary material

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Lin, N., Xu, Y., Yang, H. et al. Dissociating the neural correlates of the sociality and plausibility effects in simple conceptual combination. Brain Struct Funct 225, 995–1008 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00429-020-02052-3

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00429-020-02052-3

Keywords

Search

Navigation