Brain oscillations in language comprehension

Abstract:

Brain oscillations have been suggested as a fundamental mechanism for cognitive functions (Bastos et al., 2012; Buzsaki, 2011; Siegel, Donner, & Engel, 2012; Womelsdorf et al., 2007). Unsurprisingly, their investigation in the areas of speech and language processing is an active and growing research area (Giraud & Poeppel, 2012; Lewis, Wang, & Bastiaansen, 2015). The degree to which brain oscillations reflect basic physiological mechanisms (e.g. activity regulation within neuronal networks), domain-general cognitive functions (e.g. sustaining attentional states, predictive coding) or domain-specific cognitive processes (e.g. parsing speech signals) is still a matter of debate. The cognitive neuroscience of language offers exciting opportunities to address these issues, because it involves both fast short-lived processes close to perception (e.g. word recognition) as well as the integration of information over longer time periods (e.g. in sentences, paragraphs or stories). We can therefore expect to see the whole gamut of the brain’s oscillatory repertoire in studies on language comprehension and production. This special issue presents some recent advances in this field.