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Simultaneous representation of multiple object-states in language is supported by left temporal theta-gamma phase-amplitude coupling

Poster Session A - Saturday, March 7, 2026, 3:00 – 5:00 pm PST, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom
Also presenting in Data Blitz Session 3 - Saturday, March 7, 2026, 10:30 am – 12:00 pm PST, Salon E.

Wesley Leong^1,2 (), Gerry TM Altmann^1,2; ¹University of Connecticut, ²Connecticut Institute for the Brain and Cognitive Sciences

Consider the sentence: “The chef will chop the onion, and then he will smell it.” Comprehending this requires us to represent the same onion token in multiple distinct states (Hindy et al., 2012; Solomon et al., 2015). How do we simultaneously maintain these object-states in the brain? Here, we examine one possible neural signal: left temporal theta-gamma phase-amplitude coupling (TG-PAC). TG-PAC strength increases with visual working memory load (e.g. Axmacher et al., 2010) and performance (e.g. Reinhart & Nguyen, 2019), and is thus a strong candidate mechanism for how the brain maintains distinct object-states online. We ran two EEG experiments testing this hypothesis. In Experiment 1 (N=79; aggregated across 3 prior studies), participants read sentences where the object changed substantially or minimally (“chop” vs “weigh the onion”) then was cued for retrieval (“then he will smell it.”). TG-PAC was calculated across the sentences using a Driven Auto-Regressive model (Dupré la Tour et al., 2017). We identified a left temporal cluster showing numerically greater TG-PAC for substantial change sentences, but it was not statistically significant per a cluster-based permutation test (Maris and Oostenveld, 2007). In Experiment 2 (N=40), we added a visual working memory task as a localizer to improve sensitivity for the sentence comprehension task. Within the ROI identified by our localizer, TG-PAC increased with degree of change to the sentential object (β = 0.14, p < 0.01). We thus conclude that maintaining multiple object-states online shares a neural process with holding objects in visual working memory: left temporal TG-PAC.

Topic Area: LANGUAGE: Other