Work led by psychology graduate student Zaid Zada in the lab of PNI professor Uri Hasson, Ph.D. finds that when people are talking with each other, spoken words, rather than body language or tone of voice, helps synchronize brain activity between conversation partners.

“We can see linguistic content emerge word-by-word in the speaker’s brain before they actually articulate what they're trying to say, and the same linguistic content rapidly reemerges in the listener’s brain after they hear it,” said Zaid Zada in a press release produced by Cell Press.

The work was published in the journal Neuron on August 2.

Zada also went on to write about his team's recent findings in an article for The Conversation, where he suggests that ChatGPT and similar large language models that undergird many AI systems may process language like people do.