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Postdoctorial Fellowship Award Winner 

Subcortical contributions to prediction and reward in language processing

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.

Kshipra Gurunandan¹ (), Andrea Greve¹, Petar Raykov¹, Lihua Xia^1,2, Richard Henson¹; ¹University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK, ²Huazhong University of Science and Techonology, Wuhan, China

Language is at the core of human experience, from basic communication to artistic expression, and it has been proposed that interactions between subcortical reward mechanisms and cortical learning systems might be essential to language acquisition and learning. A number of studies have suggested that successful symbolic matching and linguistic insight activate dopaminergic reward circuits. The striatum is known to be crucial for processing of expectations and rewards or outcomes, and there is some evidence that the ventral striatum may be involved in natural story comprehension. In the current study, we investigated the role of the striatum in sentence processing and memory as functions of predictability and prediction error. Forty healthy adults underwent fMRI scanning while making probability judgements (expected, unexpected, neither) about sentence endings. Sentences were first presented with the final word blanked out and the ending was presented 6s later. Outside the scanner, participants completed a surprise memory task. ROI analyses revealed that the ventral striatum showed significantly greater activity for highly predictive sentence frames compared to less predictive ones. It also exhibited u-shaped activity as a function of prediction error, with greatest activation for predicted endings, followed by unexpected endings, followed by neutral endings. Functional connectivity with other sub-cortical regions (dorsal striatum and hippocampus) varied with expectancy and subsequent memory. Results indicate involvement of the ventral striatum in predictive processing of language, with reward and novelty responses for fulfilled/violated predictions. This supports and extends previous evidence for the role of striatal systems in linguistic processing and memory.

Topic Area: LANGUAGE: Semantic