When tigers are not animals: The neural disappearance of animacy as a function of linguistic structure

Abstract

In language, not only do sentence meanings depend on how words are structured together, but word meanings also depend on their roles in the structure. While we have some understanding of how the brain grasps complex meanings built from simpler parts, we know far less about how linguistic structure reshapes the meanings of the words themselves. Here we used magnetoencephalography (29 human participants: 16 women, 9 men, 4 nonbinary) to track the neural dynamics of animacy, a fundamental semantic feature that guides conceptual organization. Regardless of how animacy was operationalized (as discrete semantic categories or more abstractly), the same pattern emerged: When word-level animacy conflicted with the structural context, it disappeared from the word’s neural representation. Our findings show how compositional processes rapidly reconfigure neural traces of word meanings, allowing phrase-level meanings to even override word-level features. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT When we use the word tiger, it evokes the nonlinguistic concept of a tiger and allows us to convey the meaning of a wild striped feline. Here, we asked whether the neural signatures of words are stable when used across different structural positions: Is tiger the same animal in valley tiger and tiger valley? We found that phrase-level animacy dictates the content of neural representations to an extent where individual word meanings are effectively masked, providing evidence that words do not have a one-to-one mapping in the brain. By showing that not even basic word meanings are impermeable to linguistic structure, our study highlights the inherent tension arising from combining stable concepts during real-time language processing.