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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access published online on January 4, 2006
Cerebral Cortex, 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

Article

Processing Linguistic Complexity and Grammaticality in the Left Frontal Cortex

Angela D. Friederici 1 *, Christian J. Fiebach 2, Matthias Schlesewsky 3, Ina D. Bornkessel 1, and D. Yves von Cramon 1

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

* To whom correspondence should be addressed.
Angela D. Friederici, E-mail: angelafr{at}cbs.mpg.de


  Abstract

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.

Keywords: Broca's area; fMRI; left frontal operculum; linguistic complexity; pars opercularis; syntax; ungrammaticality.
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