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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access originally published online on January 4, 2006
Cerebral Cortex 2006 16(12):1709-1717; doi:10.1093/cercor/bhj106
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© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Processing Linguistic Complexity and Grammaticality in the Left Frontal Cortex

Angela D. Friederici1, Christian J. Fiebach1,2, Matthias Schlesewsky3, Ina D. Bornkessel1 and D. Yves von Cramon1

1 Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany, 2 Department of Psychology and Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA, 3 Research Group Neurolinguistics, Phillips-University Marburg, Marburg, Germany

Address correspondence to Angela D. Friederici, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Department of Neuropsychology, Stephanstrasse 1a, 04103 Leipzig, Germany. Email: angelafr{at}cbs.mpg.de.

We used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging to directly compare the hemodynamic responses associated with varying degrees of linguistic complexity with those engendered by the processing of ungrammatical utterances. We demonstrate a dissociation within the left inferior frontal cortex between the deep frontal operculum, which responds to syntactic violations, and a core region of Broca's area, that is, the inferior portion of the left pars opercularis in Brodmann area 44, the activation of which is modulated as a function of the complexity of well-formed sentences. The data demonstrate that different brain regions in the prefrontal cortex support distinct mechanisms in the mapping from a linguistic form onto meaning, thereby separating ungrammaticality from linguistic complexity.

Key Words: Broca's area • fMRI • left frontal operculum • linguistic complexity • pars opercularis • syntax • ungrammaticality


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