Abstract
Although neuroimaging and electrophysiological techniques allow a more precise determination of those neural correlates associated with sentence processing, methodological problems prevent to support an unambiguous position. Some critical factors are sentence structures per se, task condition, working memory functions and statistical analyses of imaging data. However, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data show that in particular Broca’s area (BA 44 and 45), the left supplementary motor area, and the premotor cortex are involved in complex sentence processing. These computations involve also the generation of syntactic dependencies. The findings on complex syntax are consistent with those data, which show that working memory functions, including rehearsal operations, activate different region in the prefrontal cortex. In contrast, interpreting sentence meanings seem to recruit in particular the left (but sometimes also the right) middle and superior temporal gyrus and parietal regions including the angular gyrus.
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Notes
- 1.
In Sept. 2012, “Ethnologue” classifies 6,909 distinct languages (Lewis, ed. 2009).
- 2.
Typically, Broca’s area involves BA 44 & 45, but some studies include also BA 47. In addition, the terms pars opercularis (F3op) and pars triangularis (F3t) are used which are not respectively coextensive with BA 44 and BA 45.
- 3.
In this context, a general picture about some relevant findings will be drawn and details of methodological differences among different studies such as design issues (e.g., block vs. event-related design; modality of presentation), which usually modify the final results and thus may lead in some cases to different conclusions.
- 4.
The most popular non-invasive method to measure electrophysiological activity of the brain is called event-related potentials (ERPs). It can be considered as functional electroencephalography (EEG) as electric cortical activity is measured in response to a cognitive-behavioral task, whereas electrodes are placed on the scalps surface. The EEG was discovered by the German physician Hans Berger in 1924. It reflects thousands of parallel cortical processes and correlation of the electric signal to a specific stimulus requires many trials that random noise can be averaged out. The ERPs provide an online measurement of the brain’s activity and may reveal responses, which cannot be exclusively detected by behavioral means. While the temporal resolution of ERPs is excellent (ca. < 10 ms), their spatial resolution remains undefined as ERPs cannot be (sub)cortically localized. The most known ERP components are the early left anterior negativity (ELAN), the N400 and the P600. ELAN is a negative µV response that peaks ca. < 200 ms after presentation of a phrase structure violation (e.g., Sam played on the *wrote) and the N400 is a negative response to a semantic violation ca. 400 ms after the onset of the stimulus presentation (e.g., *Sam ate the shoes); the P600 is a positive response (also called syntactic positive shift, SPS) that will be elicited at around 500 ms after stimulus presentation and peaks at ca. 600 ms; it can be measured in garden-path sentences, at gap-filling dependencies and when morpho-syntactic violations (e.g., number, case, gender) are encountered (Osterhout and Holcomb 1992).
- 5.
Magnetoencephalography (MEG), first reported by Cohen (1968), has a temporal resolution and generates evoked responses much like EEG/ERP. The magnetic components are labeled according to temporal latency. For example, the M100 is elicited ca. 100 ms post-stimulus presentation of a particular stimulus, usually tones, phonology information or words. The M400 (corresponds to the N400) is generated in context of semantic processing. However, magnetic fields are less distorted than EEG and have therefore a better spatial resolution. While EEG is sensitive to extracellular volume currents elicited by post-synaptic potentials, MEG is sensitive to intracellular currents of these synaptic potentials. EEG can detect activity in the sulci and at top of the cortical gyri, but MEG detects activity mostly in the sulci. In contrast to EEG, MEG activity can be localized with more accuracy. MEG is often combined with (f)MRI to generate functional cortical maps.
- 6.
MEG or EEG data can be mapped onto a standard anatomical brain (inverse mapping).
- 7.
The cross-modal lexical decision task is considered as an online method to examine early access to lexical (or other linguistic) information. It is a dual task because participants typically listening to individual sentences while performing simultaneously a lexical decision task (the decision whether a lexical string is a word or not) at a certain point during the sentence presentation. If in the lexical decision task a word is displayed, it can be semantically related to a word or structure in the sentence or it is unrelated. The statistical evaluation of the reaction time differences between related and control words show whether lexical priming was found or not (Swinney and Hakes 1976).
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Hillert, D. (2014). Generating Sentences. In: The Nature of Language. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-0609-3_9
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