Like all domains of cognition, language processing is affected by top–down knowledge. Classic evidence for this is missing blatant errors in the signal. In sentence comprehension, one instance is failing to notice word order errors, such as transposed words in the middle of a sentence: "you that read wrong" (Mirault et al., 2018). Our brains seem to fix such errors, since they are incompatible with our grammatical knowledge, but how do our brains do this? Following behavioral work on inner transpositions, we flashed four-word sentences for 300 ms using rapid parallel visual presentation (Snell and Grainger, 2017). We compared magnetoencephalography responses to fully grammatical and reversed sentences (24 human participants: 21 females, 4 males). The left lateral language cortex robustly distinguished grammatical and reversed sentences starting at 213 ms. Thus, the influence of grammatical knowledge begun rapidly after visual word form recognition (Tarkiainen et al., 1999). At the earliest stage of this neural "sentence superiority effect," inner transpositions patterned between grammatical and reversed sentences, showing evidence that the brain initially "noticed" the error. However, 100 ms later, inner transpositions became indistinguishable from grammatical sentences, suggesting at this point, the brain had "fixed" the error. These results show that after a single glance at a sentence, syntax impacts our neural activity almost as quickly as higher-level object recognition is assumed to take place (Cichy et al., 2014). The earliest stage involves detailed comparisons between the bottom–up input and grammatical knowledge, while shortly afterward, top–down knowledge can override an error in the stimulus.

与所有认知领域一样，语言处理也受到自上而下的知识的影响。这方面的经典证据是信号中缺少明显的错误。在句子理解中，一个例子是没有注意到词序错误，例如句子中间的转置词：“你读错了”（Mirault et al.， 2018）。我们的大脑似乎可以修复这些错误，因为它们与我们的语法知识不相容，但是我们的大脑是如何做到这一点的呢？在内部换位的行为工作之后，我们使用快速平行视觉呈现闪现了 300 毫秒的四个单词的句子（Snell 和 Grainger，2017 年）。我们将脑磁图反应与完全语法和颠倒的句子 （24 名人类参与者： 21 名女性，4 名男性） 进行了比较。左侧语言皮层从 213 毫秒开始有力地区分语法和颠倒的句子。因此，语法知识的影响在视觉词形识别之后迅速开始（Tarkiainen et al.， 1999）。在这种神经“句子优越效应”的最早阶段，内部换位在语法和反转句子之间形成模式，这表明大脑最初“注意到”了错误。然而，100 毫秒后，内部换位变得与语法句子无法区分，这表明此时大脑已经“修复”了错误。这些结果表明，在看一眼句子后，句法影响我们的神经活动的速度几乎与假设发生更高级别对象识别的速度一样快（Cichy et al.， 2014）。最早的阶段涉及自下而上的输入和语法知识之间的详细比较，而不久之后，自上而下的知识可以覆盖刺激中的错误。