Pronouns reactivate conceptual representations in human hippocampal neurons
D. E. Dijksterhuis, Matthew W. Self, Jessy K. Possel, Judith Peters, Elisabeth C.W. van Straaten, Sander Idema, J. C. Baaijen, Sandra Salm, Erik J. Aarnoutse, N. C. E. van Klink, Pieter van Eijsden, Simon Hanslmayr, Ramesh Chelvarajah, Frédéric Roux, Luca D. Kolibius, Vijay Sawlani, David T. Rollings, Stanislas Dehaene, Pieter R. Roelfsema
Abstract
During discourse comprehension, every new word adds to an evolving representation of meaning that accumulates over consecutive sentences and constrains the next words. To minimize repetition and utterance length, languages use pronouns, like the word "she," to refer to nouns and phrases that were previously introduced. It has been suggested that language comprehension requires that pronouns activate the same neuronal representations as the nouns themselves. We recorded from individual neurons in the human hippocampus during a reading task. Cells that were selective to a particular noun were later reactivated by pronouns that refer to the cells' preferred noun. These results imply that concept cells contribute to a rapid and dynamic semantic memory network that is recruited during language comprehension.