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The frontotemporal language network responds robustly and selectively to sentences. But the features of linguistic input that drive this response and the computations that these language areas support remain debated. Two key features of sentences are typically confounded in natural linguistic input: words in sentences (a) are semantically and syntactically combinable into phrase- and clause-level meanings, and (b) occur in an order licensed by the language’s grammar. Inspired by recent psycholinguistic work establishing that language processing is robust to word order violations, we hypothesized that the core linguistic computation is composition, and, thus, can take place even when the word order violates the grammatical constraints of the language. This hypothesis predicts that a linguistic string should elicit a sentence-level response in the language network provided that the words in that string can …