Contextual Semantic Relevance Tracks fMRI BOLD Responses During Naturalistic Speech Comprehension
Naturalistic language comprehension requires listeners to process both local probabilistic expectations and contextual semantic relations. This study tested whether contextual semantic relevance, measuring how strongly a target word relates to its recent semantic context, is associated with fMRI BOLD responses independently of word surprisal and lexical, timing, acoustic, and prosodic controls. We analyzed two public datasets: Alice (23 participants, one narrative) and Narratives (47 participants, 185 runs, four stories) using FIR/deconvolution and generalized additive mixed models. In Alice, semantic relevance was significant across all ROIs in FIR analyses, whereas surprisal was not. In...
| Authors | Kun Sun, Rong Wang |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 17 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 2 August 2026 |
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