Abstract Language comprehension is fast and seemingly effortless. However, in spite of long knowing what brain regions enable this feat, our knowledge of the precise neural computations that these frontal and temporal regions implement remains limited. One highly controversial question is whether functional differences exist among the neural populations that comprise the language network. Leveraging the high spatiotemporal resolution of intracranial recordings, we clustered the timecourses of responses to sentences and linguistically degraded conditions and discovered three response profiles that robustly differ in their temporal dynamics. These profiles appear to reflect different temporal receptive windows (TRWs), with average TRWs of about 1, 4, and 6 words, as estimated with a simple one-parameter model. Neural populations exhibiting these profiles are interleaved across the language network, which suggests that all language regions have direct access to distinct, multi-scale representations of linguistic input—a property that may be critical for the efficiency and robustness of language processing.

Neural populations in the language network differ in the size of their temporal receptive windows