Language at a glance: How our brains grasp linguistic structure from parallel visual input.

Abstract

Human brains grasp the gists of visual scenes from a single glance, but to what extent is this possible for language? While we typically think of language in terms of sequential speech, our everyday experience involves numerous rapidly flashing written notifications, which we understand instantly. What do our brains detect in the first few hundred milliseconds after seeing such a stimulus? We flashed short sentences during magnetoencephalography measurement, revealing sentence-sensitive neural activity in left temporal cortex within 130 milliseconds. These signals emerged for subject-verb-object sentences regardless of grammatical or semantic well-formedness, suggesting that at-a-glance language comprehension begins by detecting basic phrase structure, independent of meaning or other grammatical details. Our findings unveil one aspect of how our brains process information rapidly in today's visually saturated world.