While this large dataset on the LATL is still compatible with many
definitions of “semantic processing”, the robustness of these findings
and their generality across multiple methodologies presents an opportunity
for a systematic investigation of the computational details of
this activity. One step towards sharpening our understanding involves
recent MEG results on language production (Del Prato and Pylkkänen,
2014), where the modification of object denoting nouns with color adjectives
(blue cups) engaged the LATL,while numerical quantification of
the same nouns (two cups) did not.
More recently, magnetoencephalography (MEG) studies on minimal
combinations of two words have demonstrated that this activity relates
to very basic combinatory operations as opposed to sentence-level phenomena
both in comprehension (Bemis, and Pylkkänen, 2011, 2012)
and in production (Del Prato and Pylkkänen, 2014; Pylkkänen et al.,
2014).