Findings reveal that semantic processing involves neural activity linked to synonym relationships, suggesting a new understanding of language perception.
It is largely unknown how the brain encodes semantic distances between conceptual (verbal) knowledge. I presently show that the information on semantic distances is mainly embedded in a temporal measure (oscillation frequency) of human EEG waveforms. Participants judged a semantic relation between two words (synonym, antonym, thematically-related, taxonomically-related, or unrelated) sequentially presented. Brain rhythms (8-30 Hz) over the left language region, especially the anterior temporal lobe (ATL), were accelerated when a word pair with a high conceptual similarity (e.g. synonym) was presented. Importantly, this change in brain rhythm reflected an inter-word closeness as concepts (holistic similarity, typically seen in synonyms or thematically-related pairs), rather than an inter-word overlap of semantic features (partial similarity, typically seen in antonyms or taxonomically-related pairs). These results highlight a role of temporal measures of neural activity in semantic processing, which explains an inconsistency over previous results using hemodynamic measures.
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Yasuki Noguchi (2025) studied this question.
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