Computational Neuroscience of Language Processing in the Human Brain

NCT ID: NCT05222594

Last Updated: 2026-01-20

Study Results

Results pending

The study team has not published outcome measurements, participant flow, or safety data for this trial yet. Check back later for updates.

Basic Information

Get a concise snapshot of the trial, including recruitment status, study phase, enrollment targets, and key timeline milestones.

Recruitment Status

RECRUITING

Clinical Phase

NA

Total Enrollment

40 participants

Study Classification

INTERVENTIONAL

Study Start Date

2021-04-02

Study Completion Date

2026-03-31

Brief Summary

Review the sponsor-provided synopsis that highlights what the study is about and why it is being conducted.

Language is a signature human cognitive skill, but the precise computations that support language understanding remain unknown. This study aims to combine high-quality human neural data obtained through intracranial recordings with advances in computational modeling of human cognition to shed light on the construction and understanding of speech.

Detailed Description

Dive into the extended narrative that explains the scientific background, objectives, and procedures in greater depth.

The neural architecture of language is the foundation for the highest form of human interaction. Prior work has identified a network of frontal and temporal brain areas that selectively support language processing, but the precise computations that underlie our ability to extract meaning from sequences of words have remained unknown. The standard approaches in human cognitive neuroscience lack the spatial and temporal resolution necessary for precise comparisons to computational models. To bridge this gap in knowledge, neural responses to language stimuli will be collected from epileptic patients undergoing intracranial monitoring. Overall, these data will be used to identify cortical maps of different linguistic manipulations and to better understand properties of the human language network.

Conditions

See the medical conditions and disease areas that this research is targeting or investigating.

Language Epilepsy

Study Design

Understand how the trial is structured, including allocation methods, masking strategies, primary purpose, and other design elements.

Allocation Method

NA

Intervention Model

SINGLE_GROUP

Primary Study Purpose

BASIC_SCIENCE

Blinding Strategy

NONE

Study Groups

Review each arm or cohort in the study, along with the interventions and objectives associated with them.

Epileptic participants undergoing intracranial monitoring

Patients with pharmaco-resistant epilepsy undergoing intracranial monitoring involving the left cerebral hemisphere.

Group Type OTHER

Behavioral tasks during intracranial monitoring

Intervention Type OTHER

Participants will listen to sentences and stories while neural data are recorded through electrodes placed for clinical purposes.

Interventions

Learn about the drugs, procedures, or behavioral strategies being tested and how they are applied within this trial.

Behavioral tasks during intracranial monitoring

Participants will listen to sentences and stories while neural data are recorded through electrodes placed for clinical purposes.

Intervention Type OTHER

Eligibility Criteria

Check the participation requirements, including inclusion and exclusion rules, age limits, and whether healthy volunteers are accepted.

Inclusion Criteria

* clinical indications to proceed with intracranial monitoring involving the left cerebral hemisphere, as determined by a multidisciplinary epilepsy surgery team
* the ability to comply with test directions and provide informed consent
* between ages 18 - 85

Exclusion Criteria

* inability to understand or perform the task outlined in the protocol, or who are unwilling or unable to participate
Minimum Eligible Age

18 Years

Maximum Eligible Age

85 Years

Eligible Sex

ALL

Accepts Healthy Volunteers

No

Sponsors

Meet the organizations funding or collaborating on the study and learn about their roles.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

OTHER

Sponsor Role collaborator

Massachusetts General Hospital

OTHER

Sponsor Role lead

Responsible Party

Identify the individual or organization who holds primary responsibility for the study information submitted to regulators.

Robert Mark Richardson

Director, Functional Neurosurgery

Responsibility Role PRINCIPAL_INVESTIGATOR

Locations

Explore where the study is taking place and check the recruitment status at each participating site.

Massachusetts General Hospital

Boston, Massachusetts, United States

Site Status RECRUITING

Countries

Review the countries where the study has at least one active or historical site.

United States

Central Contacts

Reach out to these primary contacts for questions about participation or study logistics.

Evelina Fedorenko, PhD

Role: CONTACT

617-258-0670

Facility Contacts

Find local site contact details for specific facilities participating in the trial.

Robert M Richardson, MD, PhD

Role: primary

Erin Donahue, PhD

Role: backup

References

Explore related publications, articles, or registry entries linked to this study.

Blank I, Balewski Z, Mahowald K, Fedorenko E. Syntactic processing is distributed across the language system. Neuroimage. 2016 Feb 15;127:307-323. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2015.11.069. Epub 2015 Dec 5.

Reference Type BACKGROUND
PMID: 26666896 (View on PubMed)

Blank IA, Fedorenko E. No evidence for differences among language regions in their temporal receptive windows. Neuroimage. 2020 Oct 1;219:116925. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2020.116925. Epub 2020 May 11.

Reference Type BACKGROUND
PMID: 32407994 (View on PubMed)

Fedorenko E, Behr MK, Kanwisher N. Functional specificity for high-level linguistic processing in the human brain. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2011 Sep 27;108(39):16428-33. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1112937108. Epub 2011 Sep 1.

Reference Type BACKGROUND
PMID: 21885736 (View on PubMed)

Fedorenko E, Blank IA. Broca's Area Is Not a Natural Kind. Trends Cogn Sci. 2020 Apr;24(4):270-284. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2020.01.001. Epub 2020 Feb 20.

Reference Type BACKGROUND
PMID: 32160565 (View on PubMed)

Fedorenko E, Duncan J, Kanwisher N. Language-selective and domain-general regions lie side by side within Broca's area. Curr Biol. 2012 Nov 6;22(21):2059-62. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2012.09.011. Epub 2012 Oct 11.

Reference Type BACKGROUND
PMID: 23063434 (View on PubMed)

Fedorenko E, Hsieh PJ, Nieto-Castanon A, Whitfield-Gabrieli S, Kanwisher N. New method for fMRI investigations of language: defining ROIs functionally in individual subjects. J Neurophysiol. 2010 Aug;104(2):1177-94. doi: 10.1152/jn.00032.2010. Epub 2010 Apr 21.

Reference Type BACKGROUND
PMID: 20410363 (View on PubMed)

Fedorenko E, Nieto-Castanon A, Kanwisher N. Lexical and syntactic representations in the brain: an fMRI investigation with multi-voxel pattern analyses. Neuropsychologia. 2012 Mar;50(4):499-513. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2011.09.014. Epub 2011 Sep 17.

Reference Type BACKGROUND
PMID: 21945850 (View on PubMed)

Fedorenko E, Scott TL, Brunner P, Coon WG, Pritchett B, Schalk G, Kanwisher N. Neural correlate of the construction of sentence meaning. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2016 Oct 11;113(41):E6256-E6262. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1612132113. Epub 2016 Sep 26.

Reference Type BACKGROUND
PMID: 27671642 (View on PubMed)

Mollica F, Siegelman M, Diachek E, Piantadosi ST, Mineroff Z, Futrell R, Kean H, Qian P, Fedorenko E. Composition is the Core Driver of the Language-selective Network. Neurobiol Lang (Camb). 2020 Mar 1;1(1):104-134. doi: 10.1162/nol_a_00005. eCollection 2020.

Reference Type BACKGROUND
PMID: 36794007 (View on PubMed)

Nieto-Castanon A, Fedorenko E. Subject-specific functional localizers increase sensitivity and functional resolution of multi-subject analyses. Neuroimage. 2012 Nov 15;63(3):1646-69. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2012.06.065. Epub 2012 Jul 8.

Reference Type BACKGROUND
PMID: 22784644 (View on PubMed)

Norman-Haignere S, Kanwisher NG, McDermott JH. Distinct Cortical Pathways for Music and Speech Revealed by Hypothesis-Free Voxel Decomposition. Neuron. 2015 Dec 16;88(6):1281-1296. doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2015.11.035.

Reference Type BACKGROUND
PMID: 26687225 (View on PubMed)

Pereira F, Lou B, Pritchett B, Ritter S, Gershman SJ, Kanwisher N, Botvinick M, Fedorenko E. Toward a universal decoder of linguistic meaning from brain activation. Nat Commun. 2018 Mar 6;9(1):963. doi: 10.1038/s41467-018-03068-4.

Reference Type BACKGROUND
PMID: 29511192 (View on PubMed)

Shain C, Blank IA, van Schijndel M, Schuler W, Fedorenko E. fMRI reveals language-specific predictive coding during naturalistic sentence comprehension. Neuropsychologia. 2020 Feb 17;138:107307. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2019.107307. Epub 2019 Dec 24.

Reference Type BACKGROUND
PMID: 31874149 (View on PubMed)

Siegelman M, Blank IA, Mineroff Z, Fedorenko E. An Attempt to Conceptually Replicate the Dissociation between Syntax and Semantics during Sentence Comprehension. Neuroscience. 2019 Aug 10;413:219-229. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroscience.2019.06.003. Epub 2019 Jun 11.

Reference Type BACKGROUND
PMID: 31200104 (View on PubMed)

Other Identifiers

Review additional registry numbers or institutional identifiers associated with this trial.

2020P001989

Identifier Type: -

Identifier Source: org_study_id

More Related Trials

Additional clinical trials that may be relevant based on similarity analysis.

Brain Injury and Cognitive Function
NCT05922748 RECRUITING NA
Neural Bases of Motivation
NCT07251816 RECRUITING NA