@misc{10481/107917,
year = {2025},
month = {10},
url = {https://hdl.handle.net/10481/107917},
abstract = {The ability to generalize previously learned knowledge to novel situations is crucial for adaptive behavior, representing
a form of cognitive flexibility that is particularly relevant in language. Humans excel at combining linguistic building
blocks to infer the meanings of novel compositional words, such as “un-reject-able-ish”. The neural mechanisms and
representations required for this ability remain unclear. To unravel these, we trained participants on a semi-artificial
language in which the meanings of compositional words could be derived from known stems and unknown affixes,
using abstract relational structure rules (e.g., “good-kla” which means “bad”, where “-kla” reverses the meaning of
the stem word “good”). According to these rules, word meaning depended on the sequential relation between the
stem and the affix (i.e., pre- vs. post-stem). During fMRI, participants performed a semantic priming task, with novel
compositional words as either sequential order congruent (e.g., “short-kla”) or incongruent primes (e.g., “kla-short”),
and real words serving as targets that were synonyms of the composed meaning of the congruent primes (e.g.,
“long”). Our results show that the compositional process engaged a broad temporoparietal network, while representations of composed word meaning were localized in a more circumscribed left-lateralized language network. Strikingly, newly composed meanings were decodable already at the time of the prime in a way that could not be accounted
for representations of the prime words themselves. Finally, we found that the composition process recruited abstract
rule representations in a bilateral frontoparietal network, in contrast to our preregistered prediction of a medial
prefrontal-hippocampal network. These results support the hypothesis that people activate a bilateral frontoparietal
circuitry for compositional inference and generalization in language.},
organization = {Dutch Research Council (NWO) (Gravitation Grant. 024.001.006; Veni Grant. VI.Veni.231C.010)},
publisher = {MIT Press},
keywords = {abstract rule learning},
keywords = {compositional generalization},
keywords = {cognitive control},
title = {Abstract rule generalization for composing novel meaning recruits a frontoparietal control network},
doi = {10.1162/IMAG.a.963},
author = {Zheng, Xiaochen Y. and Garvert, Mona M. and den Ouden, Hanneke E. M. and Horstman, Lisa I. and Richter, David and Cools, Roshan},
}