[Source: Science Daily]

Our brain links incoming speech sounds to knowledge of grammar, which is abstract in nature. But how does the brain encode abstract sentence structure? In a neuroimaging study published in PLOS Biology, researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Psycholinguistics and Radboud University in Nijmegen report that the brain encodes the structure of sentences (‘the vase is red’) and phrases (‘the red vase’) into different neural firing patterns.