More Than One Way to Build a Thought

BrainPost, 21 April 2020

Have you ever wondered how you understand a sentence that you’ve never read before? Our brains rely on the principle of compositionality, or how we understand the meanings and order of words within a sentence. Even simple sentences require us to understand each word individually, as well as the order the words are presented in. While several studies over the last 20 years have used functional neuroimaging techniques to study how the brain develops strategies to represent the meanings of different parts of a sentence, less is known about how the brain combines individual meanings of words to store the meaning of a complete sentence. Read more.