Skip Navigation



Cerebral Cortex Advance Access published online on November 17, 2009
Cerebral Cortex, doi:10.1093/cercor/bhp249
This Article
Right arrow Full Text Freely available
Right arrow FREE Full Text (PDF) Freely available
Right arrow Supplementary Data
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Similar articles in PubMed
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Meltzer, J. A.
Right arrow Articles by Braun, A. R.
PubMed
Right arrow PubMed Citation
Right arrow Articles by Meltzer, J. A.
Right arrow Articles by Braun, A. R.
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?

Published by Oxford University Press 2009.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Neural Aspects of Sentence Comprehension: Syntactic Complexity, Reversibility, and Reanalysis

Jed A. Meltzer1, Joseph J. McArdle1, Robin J. Schafer2 and Allen R. Braun1

1 Language Section, Voice, Speech, and Language Branch, National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD 20892, USA, 2 American Association for the Advancement of Science, Washington, DC 20005, USA

Address correspondence to Jed A. Meltzer, PhD, Building 10, Room 5C-410, Bethesda, MD 20892, USA. Email: jed.meltzer{at}aya.yale.edu.

Broca's area is preferentially activated by reversible sentences with complex syntax, but various linguistic factors may be responsible for this finding, including syntactic movement, working-memory demands, and post hoc reanalysis. To distinguish between these, we tested the interaction of syntactic complexity and semantic reversibility in a functional magnetic resonance imaging study of sentence–picture matching. During auditory comprehension, semantic reversibility induced selective activation throughout the left perisylvian language network. In contrast, syntactic complexity (object-embedded vs. subject-embedded relative clauses) within reversible sentences engaged only the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) and left precentral gyrus. Within irreversible sentences, only the LIFG was sensitive to syntactic complexity, confirming a unique role for this region in syntactic processing. Nonetheless, larger effects of reversibility itself occurred in the same regions, suggesting that full syntactic parsing may be a nonautomatic process applied as needed. Complex reversible sentences also induced enhanced signals in LIFG and left precentral regions on subsequent picture selection, but with additional recruitment of the right hemisphere homolog area (right inferior frontal gyrus) as well, suggesting that post hoc reanalysis of sentence structure, compared with initial comprehension, engages an overlapping but larger network of brain regions. These dissociable effects may offer a basis for studying the reorganization of receptive language function after brain damage.

Key Words: Broca's area • fMRI • language • semantic • syntax


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?




Disclaimer: Please note that abstracts for content published before 1996 were created through digital scanning and may therefore not exactly replicate the text of the original print issues. All efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, but the Publisher will not be held responsible for any remaining inaccuracies. If you require any further clarification, please contact our Customer Services Department.