Contextual Semantic Relevance Tracks fMRI BOLD Responses During Naturalistic Speech Comprehension

arXiv:2607.15856v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Naturalistic language comprehension requires listeners to process both local probabilistic expectations and contextual semantic relations. Surprisal has been widely used to quantify local word unexpectedness, but evidence that it robustly predicts fMRI BOLD responses during continuous comprehension has been mixed. This study investigates whether contextual semantic relevance, defined as how strongly an incoming word relates to its recent semantic c...