Abstract rule generalization for composing novel meaning recruits a frontoparietal control network Zheng, Xiaochen Y. Garvert, Mona M. den Ouden, Hanneke E. M. Horstman, Lisa I. Richter, David Cools, Roshan abstract rule learning compositional generalization cognitive control 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. 2025-11-11T09:10:27Z 2025-11-11T09:10:27Z 2025-10-08 journal article Zheng, X. Y., Garvert, M. M., den Ouden, H. E. M., Horstman, L. I., Richter, D., & Cools, R. (2025). Abstract rule generalization for composing novel meaning recruits a frontoparietal control network. Imaging Neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.), 3(IMAG.a.963). https://doi.org/10.1162/IMAG.a.963 https://hdl.handle.net/10481/107917 10.1162/IMAG.a.963 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ open access Atribución 4.0 Internacional MIT Press