This paper aims to review the article written by Bemis and Pylkkänen (2011) and entitled “Simple Composition: A Magnetoencephalography Investigation into the Comprehension of Minimal Linguistic Phrases.” It describes a study in which the researchers aimed to explore what happens in the brain when a person processes simple compositions, namely, a combination of an adjective and a noun. The authors used magnetoencephalography as a research methodology to visualize the brain activity of participants who were shown nouns in minimal compositional and non-compositional contexts.
The study methods and results are objective since the researchers used an experimental research design: they compared participants’ responses to combinatorial and non-combinatorial contexts. The former represented an experimental condition, while the latter was the control condition. The researchers used a sample of 25 individuals, which is a middle-sized sample allowing for the generalizability of the findings. The methods are described in detail, which enables other researchers to replicate the study. The result data are organized in a comprehensible way, allowing for easy comparisons between participants’ responses to each type of activity.
The research findings provide a new perspective on how the human brain processes simple compositions. Bemis and Pylkkänen (2011) found that processing the simple compositions led to increased activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and the left anterior temporal lobe. These findings align with the previous research that has revealed the link between these regions and syntactic and semantic combinatorial processing. Moreover, Bemis and Pylkkänen (2011) enhanced the scientific understanding of language processing by showing that the brain processes syntactic composition before semantic composition. Overall, their study prompts scholars to explore an expanded network of neural regions to improve the neurophysiological models of language.
In conclusion, this work is groundbreaking because it focuses on basic processes involved in the expressive function of language. Prior to this study, most scholars focused on complex combinatorial operations instead of studying basic processes that allow people to construct infinite ideas with a finite set of words. By shifting their focus to simple compositions, the authors have enhanced scholars’ understanding of the language-processing activity of the brain.
Reference
Bemis, D. K., & Pylkkänen, L. (2011). Simple composition: A magnetoencephalography investigation into the comprehension of minimal linguistic phrases. Journal of Neuroscience, 31(8), 2801-2814. Web.