Fig. 1.

Narrative construction in the hierarchical processing framework. (A) The proposed cortical hierarchy of increasing TRWs (adapted from ref. 5). (B) Each level of the processing hierarchy continuously accumulates information over inputs from the preceding level. For example, phrases built over words are constructed into sentences. The accumulated information is flushed out at structural boundaries. (C) Each level of the processing hierarchy provides the building blocks for the next level, which naturally leads to longer TRWs, corresponding to linguistic units of increasing sizes. This model of narrative construction along the cortical processing hierarchy implies a gradient of response lags across the cortical hierarchy.