Extracting token-level signals of syntactic processing from fMRI - with an application to PoS induction

Joachim Bingel, Maria Barrett, Anders Søgaard

Abstract: Neuro-imaging studies on reading different parts of speech (PoS) report somewhat mixed results, yet some of them indicate different activations with different PoS. This paper addresses the difficulty of using fMRI to discriminate between linguistic tokens in reading of running text because of low temporal resolution. We show that once we solve this problem, fMRI data contains a signal of PoS distinctions to the extent that it improves PoS induction with error reductions of more than 4%.