This chapter covers how the human brain combines meaning across words (compositional semantics), beginning with pairs of words and working up to sentence processing. Concepts that are easy to combine – such as a “red apple” – appear to rely on the lateral anterior temporal lobe and the angular gyrus. Understanding sentences introduces additional demands during comprehension and is often associated with recruitment of left inferior frontal cortex. Additional regions come in to play for specific types of language challenge. When words are associated with multiple meanings, the correct interpretation must be selected based on the surrounding context. This process of semantic disambiguation is associated with additional activity in posterior temporal cortex and left prefrontal cortex. Compared to simpler sentences, understanding sentences with complex syntactic constructions also engages additional regions of posterior superior temporal gyrus and inferior frontal cortex. Finally, ongoing oscillatory activity, especially in the theta range, has been suggested to play key roles in parsing and understanding connected speech.

Utterances are communicative acts. They bear observable structures that relate to constraints on actions and the processing of sequences of actions. In viewing utterances this way, rather than as sentences on a page, it is essential to consider that oral communication rests on a basic speaker–listener parity, which is achieved through motor-sensory coupling.This coupling not only applies to articulatory-acoustic features but also, at a basic level, to multimodal information that binds to structures of motor speech and which serves to constitute semantic representations. Research on motor-sensory coupling is discussed with a focus on the adaptation of couplings with speech experience. These adaptations entail different types of learning, including reinforcement and supervised and Hebbian learning, that relatecortical and subcortical processes. Whereas motor-sensory coupling at cortical levels is well known, an outline of proposals is provided bearing on the role of subcortical systems. A process of neural entrainment is presented as a pivotal principle by which multisensory information couples to structures of motor speech.