# Multipath parsing in the brain

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.18046 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.18046/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 76 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Jan 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05100/) (2022)
- [AdapterHub: A Framework for Adapting Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07779/) (2020)
- [Why Does Surprisal From Larger Transformer-Based Language Models Provide a Poorer Fit to Human Reading Times?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.12131/) (2022)
- [What Language Model to Train if You Have One Million GPU Hours?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15424/) (2022)
- [Finding Syntax in Human Encephalography with Beam Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.04127/) (2018)
- [Probing for Incremental Parse States in Autoregressive Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09748/) (2022)
- [Information-Restricted Neural Language Models Reveal Different Brain Regions' Sensitivity to Semantics, Syntax and Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14389/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Humans understand sentences word-by-word, in the order that they hear them. This incrementality entails resolving temporary ambiguities about syntactic relationships. We investigate how humans process these syntactic ambiguities by correlating predictions from incremental generative dependency parsers with timecourse data from people undergoing functional neuroimaging while listening to an audiobook. In particular, we compare competing hypotheses regarding the number of developing syntactic analyses in play during word-by-word comprehension: one vs more than one. This comparison involves evaluating syntactic surprisal from a state-of-the-art dependency parser with LLM-adapted encodings against an existing fMRI dataset. In both English and Chinese data, we find evidence for multipath parsing. Brain regions associated with this multipath effect include bilateral superior temporal gyrus.