Syntactic and thematic constraint effects on blood oxygenation level dependent signal correlates of comprehension of relative clauses - PubMed (original) (raw)

Comparative Study

Syntactic and thematic constraint effects on blood oxygenation level dependent signal correlates of comprehension of relative clauses

David Caplan et al. J Cogn Neurosci. 2008 Apr.

Abstract

The effects of plausibility of thematic role assignment and syntactic structure on blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) signal were studied using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging by orthogonally varying syntactic structure (subject-vs. object-extracted relative clauses) and the plausibility of nouns playing thematic roles (constrained vs. unconstrained sentences) in a plausibility judgment task. In plausible sentences, BOLD signal increased for object-compared to subject-extracted clauses in unconstrained sentences in left middle temporal and left inferior frontal areas, for this contrast in constrained sentences in left middle temporal but not left inferior frontal areas, and for constrained subject-extracted sentences compared to unconstrained subject-extracted sentences in the left inferior frontal gyrus and the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. We relate these areas of activation to the assignment of the syntactic structure of object-compared to subject-extracted structures and the process of checking which thematic roles activated in the course of processing a sentence are licensed by the syntactic structure of the sentence.

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Figures

Figure 1

Figure 1

Mean accuracy (percent errors; red bars) and RTs (msec/character; blue bars) for different sentence conditions. SS = subject-extracted clause; SO = object-extracted clause; Con = constrained thematic roles; Uncon = unconstrained thematic roles.

Figure 2

Figure 2

SPM analysis of BOLD signal in contrast of object- and subject-extracted constrained and unconstrained plausible sentences. SO = object-extracted sentences; SS = subject-extracted sentences.

Figure 3

Figure 3

SPM analysis of BOLD signal in contrast of constrained and unconstrained plausible SS sentences.

Figure 4

Figure 4

Percent increase in BOLD signal relative to prestimulus baselines in left frontal (blue) and temporal (red) ROIs.

Figure 5

Figure 5

A model of the operations involved in making plausibility judgments about SO and SS constrained and unconstrained sentences. Syntactic operations in A are localized in left middle and superior temporal structures. The operations labeled B that check thematic roles for their plausibility are localized in areas of the brain that are not identified in this study. The operations labeled C that check thematic roles for their origin in the syntax are localized in left inferior and dorsolateral frontal regions.

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