Assistant Professor Jonathan Brennan, Christophe Pallier and Colleagues (Paris) received a National Science Foundation (NSF) Collaborative Research in Computational Neuroscience (CRCNS) Grant. John Hale (Cornell University) is aso a part of their tem but is funded under a separate award. For this grant. The French National Research Agency considered US-French research and data sharing proposals that were submitted to the NSF.

This grant will be used to develop computational models of brain systems involved in sentence structure.

From the Computational Neurolinguistics Lab website:
The basic idea of the project is this: Computational neuroscience has matured to the point where ideas from computational linguistics may now be applied to the analysis of neural signals. This offers a new way of studying human language in the brain. While dominant models assign intuitive verbal labels to nodes of the “language network” (for example, see the articles collected in the mega-volume edited by Hickok and Small), new investigations of information flowing through this network use explicit language models based on n-grams, dependency relations and even phrase structure (e.g. Wehbe et al., 2014; Willems et al., 2015, Brennan et al., 2016). Applying increasingly realistic conceptualizations of sentence structure, this new approach goes beyond intuitive verbal labels by matching particular mechanisms to particular nodes of the brain’s language network. Our project for the first time rigorously compares alternative candidate mechanisms of language comprehension.

Read more about it here.