Sentence-level neural dynamics in speech motor cortex

Single-unit activity in speech motor cortex encodes sentence-level linguistic structure, with stimulus-condition decoding in areas 6v and 55b across three BrainGate2 participants.

• Why it matters: It was unclear whether speech motor cortex reflects higher-order linguistic organization beyond phonemes, syllables, articulatory features, and speech sequences.
• What they did: In three BrainGate2 participants with microelectrode arrays in the left precentral gyrus, neural activity was recorded during an instructed-delay task using English sentences, word lists, syntactically structured nonword sentences, and nonword lists.
• The result: Stimulus condition was decodable in all three participants, with stronger effects in 55b, and semantic categories of English sentences were decodable in two larger datasets.

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