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. 2017 Dec;38(12):6096-6106.
doi: 10.1002/hbm.23814. Epub 2017 Sep 20.

Decoding the neural representation of story meanings across languages

Morteza Dehghani  1 , Reihane Boghrati  1 , Kingson Man  1 , Joe Hoover  1 , Sarah I Gimbel  1 , Ashish Vaswani  2 , Jason D Zevin  1 , Mary Helen Immordino-Yang  1 , Andrew S Gordon  1 , Antonio Damasio  1 , Jonas T Kaplan  1
Affiliations

Decoding the neural representation of story meanings across languages

Morteza Dehghani et al. Hum Brain Mapp. 2017 Dec.

Abstract

Drawing from a common lexicon of semantic units, humans fashion narratives whose meaning transcends that of their individual utterances. However, while brain regions that represent lower-level semantic units, such as words and sentences, have been identified, questions remain about the neural representation of narrative comprehension, which involves inferring cumulative meaning. To address these questions, we exposed English, Mandarin, and Farsi native speakers to native language translations of the same stories during fMRI scanning. Using a new technique in natural language processing, we calculated the distributed representations of these stories (capturing the meaning of the stories in high-dimensional semantic space), and demonstrate that using these representations we can identify the specific story a participant was reading from the neural data. Notably, this was possible even when the distributed representations were calculated using stories in a different language than the participant was reading. Our results reveal that identification relied on a collection of brain regions most prominently located in the default mode network. These results demonstrate that neuro-semantic encoding of narratives happens at levels higher than individual semantic units and that this encoding is systematic across both individuals and languages. Hum Brain Mapp 38:6096-6106, 2017. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Keywords: knowledge representation; language neuroscience; machine learning; natural language processing; semantics.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Intra‐language searchlight maps. Colored voxels indicate regions in which English, Farsi, and Chinese stories, presented to participants in their native languages, were all successfully decoded. The most prominent cluster was found in the posteromedial cortices, bilaterally. Other clusters on the medial surface included the superior frontal gyrus, paracingulate gyrus, and frontal pole. On the lateral surface, a prominent cluster was centered on the angular gyrus. [Color figure can be viewed at http://wileyonlinelibrary.com]
Figure 2
Figure 2
Inter‐language searchlight maps. Colored voxels indicate regions in which story representations, which were generated from stories in a language unfamiliar to the participant, were successfully decoded in English, Farsi, and Chinese speakers. A similar set of regions were found as for intra‐language decoding, including the cortical midline structures and fronto‐parietal regions. [Color figure can be viewed at http://wileyonlinelibrary.com]
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