We discuss the results as supporting domain-general accounts of the P600 during natural language comprehension.
We tested the possibility of enhancing natural language comprehension through the application of anodal tDCS (a-tDCS) over the left inferior frontal gyrus, a key region for verbal short-term memory and language comprehension.
Machine learning, broadly defined as the ability for computers to learn patterns from data without being explicitly programmed, has seen enormous developments in the past decade, particularly also in the subfields of image recognition and natural language comprehension.
Regardless of load on short-term memory, the Anodal group performed significantly better than the Sham group, thus providing evidence that a-tDCS over LIFG enhances natural language comprehension.
It might be that segmentation or working memory depends on somatomotor representations in a way that natural speech comprehension does not.
However, the fact that these entrained responses are significantly enhanced when linguistic information is available indicates that it is not solely acoustic factors that drive phase locking during natural speech comprehension.
Indeed similar findings are not always obtained in more natural speech comprehension tasks (Krieger-Redwood et al. 2013) or when the response to speech is compared with acoustically complex non-speech baselines (Scott et al. 2000, 2006).
As this ability has been found to correlate with natural language comprehension (Xu and Carey 1996) and to reveal itself in linguistically supported contexts specifically (Xu 2002; Xu et al. 2005), one hypothesis is that language is necessary for the development of this very ability (Xu 2002).
While the selection of a target from a set of competing alternatives represents a meta-linguistic task, natural language comprehension requires the online evaluation of novel language input, for instance, whether we agree on something or not, or whether something is true or not (Hagoort et al., 2004).
Instead, the Programme for International Student Assessment saw the homeland of the Nobel prize drop below the OECD average in maths, reading comprehension, natural science and problem solving.
