Semantic encoding during language comprehension at single-cell resolution

Researchers conducted a study to investigate how neurons in the human brain represent linguistic meaning during language comprehension at the cellular level. They recorded from single cells in the left language-dominant prefrontal cortex of participants listening to diverse sentences and stories. The study revealed that individual neurons exhibited a fine-scale cortical representation of semantic information, responding selectively to specific word meanings and dynamically reflecting meanings based on sentence context. Neurons accurately predicted semantic categories of words in real-time during speech and encoded hierarchical structures of meaning representations. The research sheds light on how cells represent semantic relationships among words during speech processing. By using word embedding approaches and clustering procedures, the study identified nine semantic domains to which neurons selectively responded. Overall, the findings provide insights into the detailed cortical organization of semantic representations at the neuron scale in humans and the cellular-level processing of meaning during language comprehension.