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Peer-reviewedCC BY-NCScience Advances

Hybrid spatial organization and evidence for magnitude-independent neural coding of linguistic information during sentence production

  • Adam Milton Morgan1
  • Orrin Devinsky1
  • Werner Doyle2
  • Patricia C. Dugan1
  • Daniel J. Friedman1
  • Adeen Flinker3,1
  1. 1Department of Neurology, NYU Grossman School of Medicine, New York & 10016, USA
  2. 2Department of Neurosurgery, NYU Grossman School of Medicine, New York & 10016, USA
  3. 3Department of Biomedical Engineering, NYU Tandon School of Engineering, New York & 11201, USA
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Abstract

Humans are the only species with the ability to systematically combine words to convey an unbounded number of complex meanings. This process is guided by combinatorial processes whose underlying neural mechanisms remain obscured by inherent limitations of noninvasive brain measures and a near-total focus on comprehension paradigms. Here, we address these limitations with high-resolution neurosurgical recordings (electrocorticography) and a controlled sentence production experiment. We uncover distinct cortical networks encoding word-level and higher-order information. These networks exhibited a hybrid spatial organization: broadly distributed across traditional language areas but with focal concentrations of sensitivity to semantic and structural contrasts in canonical language regions. In contrast to previous comprehension-based findings, we find that these networks are largely nonoverlapping. Most notably, higher-order linguistic information showed an unexpected dissociation from local activity magnitude. This result establishes an operational dissociation between activity magnitude and information content, pointing toward a potentially distinct neural coding scheme for higher-order language, with important implications for the neurobiology of language.

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Cite

BibTeXRIS
BibTeX
@article{morgan2026hybrid,
  title = {{Hybrid spatial organization and evidence for magnitude-independent neural coding of linguistic information during sentence production}},
  author = {Adam Milton Morgan and Orrin Devinsky and Werner Doyle and Patricia C. Dugan and Daniel J. Friedman and Adeen Flinker},
  journal = {Science Advances},
  year = {2026},
  month = aug,
  doi = {10.1126/sciadv.aec0518},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aec0518},
  note = {CC BY-NC},
}
RIS
TY  - JOUR
TI  - Hybrid spatial organization and evidence for magnitude-independent neural coding of linguistic information during sentence production
AU  - Adam Milton Morgan
AU  - Orrin Devinsky
AU  - Werner Doyle
AU  - Patricia C. Dugan
AU  - Daniel J. Friedman
AU  - Adeen Flinker
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/08/05
JO  - Science Advances
DO  - 10.1126/sciadv.aec0518
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aec0518
AB  - Humans are the only species with the ability to systematically combine words to convey an unbounded number of complex meanings. This process is guided by combinatorial processes whose underlying neural mechanisms remain obscured by inherent limitations of noninvasive brain measures and a near-total focus on comprehension paradigms. Here, we address these limitations with high-resolution neurosurgical recordings (electrocorticography) and a controlled sentence production experiment. We uncover distinct cortical networks encoding word-level and higher-order information. These networks exhibited a hybrid spatial organization: broadly distributed across traditional language areas but with focal concentrations of sensitivity to semantic and structural contrasts in canonical language regions. In contrast to previous comprehension-based findings, we find that these networks are largely nonoverlapping. Most notably, higher-order linguistic information showed an unexpected dissociation from local activity magnitude. This result establishes an operational dissociation between activity magnitude and information content, pointing toward a potentially distinct neural coding scheme for higher-order language, with important implications for the neurobiology of language.
SN  - 2375-2548
ER  -