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Contributed Talk Session: Thursday, August 14, 11:00 am – 12:00 pm, Room C1.03
Poster Session C: Friday, August 15, 2:00 – 5:00 pm, de Brug & E‑Hall

A Two-Dimensional Space of Linguistic Representations Shared Across Individuals

Greta Tuckute¹, Elizabeth J. Lee¹, Yongtian Ou², Evelina Fedorenko¹, Kendrick Kay²; ¹Massachusetts Institute of Technology, ²University of Minnesota - Twin Cities

Presenter: Greta Tuckute

Humans learn and use language in diverse ways, yet all typically developing individuals acquire at least one language and use it to communicate complex ideas. This fundamental ability raises a key question: Which dimensions of language processing are shared across brains, and how are these dimensions organized in the human cortex? To address these questions, we collected ultra-high-field (7T) fMRI data while eight participants listened to 200 linguistically diverse sentences. To identify main components of variance in the sentence-evoked brain responses, we performed data decomposition and systematically tested which components generalize across individuals. Only two shared components emerged robustly, together accounting for about 32% of the explainable variance. Analysis of linguistic feature preferences showed that the first component corresponds to processing difficulty, and the second—to meaning abstractness. Both components are spatially distributed across frontal and temporal areas associated with language processing but, surprisingly, also extended into the ventral visual cortex. These findings reveal a low-dimensional, spatially structured representational basis for language processing shared across humans.

Topic Area: Language & Communication

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