HED LISA schema

The cognitive neuroscience of language is a large subdomain that investigates the neural basis of language processing. Language is central to human cognition and the majority of neuroimaging experiments make use of language in their experimental designs. Analysis of language experiments can be based on the low-level orthographic or phonetic characteristics of stimuli, or higher level syntactic and grammatical properties.

LISA is a Hierarchical Event Descriptors Library Schema for Linguistic Stimuli Annotation. The schema allows for detailed annotation of neuroimaging experiments that involve language events, from carefully controlled experiments in the domain of language processing, to more complex naturalistic paradigms involving written or spoken language.

LISA allows for annotation of language stimuli on different levels through the orthogonal definition of Language-items and Language-item-properties. Full sentences can be annotated with sentence-level characteristics, while the individual words in the sentence can be associated with word-level characteristics, and so on. Annotation possibilities are extensive and cover characteristics found across languages to allow for between language comparisons.

Development of LISA

LISA is currently under development and only available in prerelease. The current version of the schema is primarily centered around written language and further development focusses on adding grammatical aspect characteristics and spoken word characteristics into the vocabulary. If you are interested in participating in this effort or have any comments or suggestions, please post an issue to this repository.