# Lexical representation explains cortical entrainment during speech comprehension

## TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that cortical entrainment observed during speech comprehension can be explained solely by lexical properties, challenging the idea that hierarchical syntactic processing is necessary for such neural patterns.

## Contribution

The authors introduce a simple lexical-based computational model that accounts for cortical entrainment without involving hierarchical syntactic structures.

## Key findings

- The model predicts power spectra consistent with neuroimaging results.
- Cortical entrainment can be explained by lexical properties alone.
- Hierarchical syntax is not required to account for observed neural patterns.

## Abstract

Results from a recent neuroimaging study on spoken sentence comprehension have been interpreted as evidence for cortical entrainment to hierarchical syntactic structure. We present a simple computational model that predicts the power spectra from this study, even though the model's linguistic knowledge is restricted to the lexical level, and word-level representations are not combined into higher-level units (phrases or sentences). Hence, the cortical entrainment results can also be explained from the lexical properties of the stimuli, without recourse to hierarchical syntax.