The inferior frontal cortex in artificial syntax processing: An rTMS study (original) (raw)
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NeuroImage, 2004
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in humans has revealed increases in brain activity associated with various mental activities that are task-dependent. However, changes in brain activity have been dependent on baseline as well as experimental tasks. In the present study, fMRI was applied to investigate the most appropriate baseline task, picture naming or passive viewing of nonsense objects, to isolate syntactic processes related to 14.7-s blocks of silent sentence generation in 10 neurologically normal adults. The aim of this comparison was to determine the most suitable baseline task for the purpose of elucidating changes in the neural substrates of sentence generation following therapy for syntax production problems. Use of naming but not passive object viewing as a baseline task obscured activity in Broca's area, a region previously shown to be involved in syntactic processing. These results suggest that passive viewing of nonsense objects serves as a more appropriate baseline comparison than object naming for investigating sentence processing. D
Grammatical Distinctions in the Left Frontal Cortex
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 2001
& Selective deficits in producing verbs relative to nouns in speech are well documented in neuropsychology and have been associated with left hemisphere frontal cortical lesions resulting from stroke and other neurological disorders. The basis for these impairments is unresolved: Do they arise because of differences in the way grammatical categories of words are organized in the brain, or because of differences in the neural representation of actions and objects? We used repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to suppress the excitability of a portion of left prefrontal cortex and to assess its role in producing nouns and verbs. In one experiment subjects generated real words; in a second, they produced pseudowords as nouns or verbs. In both experiments, response latencies increased for verbs but were unaffected for nouns following rTMS. These results demonstrate that grammatical categories have a neuroanatomical basis and that the left prefrontal cortex is selectively engaged in processing verbs as grammatical objects. &
What artificial grammar learning reveals about the neurobiology of syntax
Brain and Language, 2012
In this paper we examine the neurobiological correlates of syntax, the processing of structured sequences, by comparing FMRI results on artificial and natural language syntax. We discuss these and similar findings in the context of formal language and computability theory. We used a simple right-linear unification grammar in an implicit artificial grammar learning paradigm in 32 healthy Dutch university students (natural language FMRI data were already acquired for these participants). We predicted that artificial syntax processing would engage the left inferior frontal region (BA 44/45) and that this activation would overlap with syntax-related variability observed in the natural language experiment. The main findings of this study show that the left inferior frontal region centered on BA 44/45 is active during artificial syntax processing of well-formed (grammatical) sequence independent of local subsequence familiarity. The same region is engaged to a greater extent when a syntactic violation is present and structural unification becomes difficult or impossible. The effects related to artificial syntax in the left inferior frontal region (BA 44/45) were essentially identical when we masked these with activity related to natural syntax in the same subjects. Finally, the medial temporal lobe was deactivated during this operation, consistent with the view that implicit processing does not rely on declarative memory mechanisms that engage the medial temporal lobe. In the context of recent FMRI findings, we raise the question whether Broca's region (or subregions) is specifically related to syntactic movement operations or the processing of hierarchically nested non-adjacent dependencies in the discussion section. We conclude that this is not the case. Instead, we argue that the left inferior frontal region is a generic on-line sequence processor that unifies information from various sources in an incremental and recursive manner, independent of whether there are any processing requirements related to syntactic movement or hierarchically nested structures. In addition, we argue that the Chomsky hierarchy is not directly relevant for neurobiological systems.
fMRI Syntactic and Lexical Repetition Effects Reveal the Initial Stages of Learning a New Language
The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 2016
When learning a new language, we build brain networks to process and represent the acquired words and syntax and integrate these with existing language representations. It is an open question whether the same or different neural mechanisms are involved in learning and processing a novel language compared with the native language(s). Here we investigated the neural repetition effects of repeating known and novel word orders while human subjects were in the early stages of learning a new language. Combining a miniature language with a syntactic priming paradigm, we examined the neural correlates of language learning on-line using functional magnetic resonance imaging. In left inferior frontal gyrus and posterior temporal cortex, the repetition of novel syntactic structures led to repetition enhancement, whereas repetition of known structures resulted in repetition suppression. Additional verb repetition led to an increase in the syntactic repetition enhancement effect in language-rela...
Brain and Behavior, 2019
IntroductionWords are not processed in isolation but in rich contexts that are used to modulate and facilitate language comprehension. Here, we investigate distinct neural networks underlying two types of contexts, the current linguistic environment and verb‐based syntactic preferences.MethodsWe had two main manipulations. The first was the current linguistic environment, where the relative frequencies of two syntactic structures (prepositional object [PO] and double‐object [DO]) would either follow everyday linguistic experience or not. The second concerned the preference toward one or the other structure depending on the verb; learned in everyday language use and stored in memory. German participants were reading PO and DO sentences in German while brain activity was measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging.ResultsFirst, the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) showed a pattern of activation that integrated the current linguistic environment with everyday linguistic experien...
When syntactic errors go unnoticed: an fMRI study of the effect of semantics on syntax
Ilha do Desterro A Journal of English Language, Literatures in English and Cultural Studies, 2012
in our day to day conversations there are often times when we fail to notice syntactic errors. but why? in this study we conducted both a behavioral and an fMri study to address this question. The results showed that participants were more likely to fail to detect a morphosyntactic violation if the sentence constituents were semantically related to each other than if they were unrelated. in addition, the related anomalous sentences elicited stronger activation of the left inferior frontal gyrus. Three separate clusters of activation were observed encompassing ba 44, ba 45/46 and one at the junction of the inferior frontal and precentral sulci. While previous work has demonstrated that
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 2009
& Priming effects have been well documented in behavioral psycholinguistics experiments: The processing of a word or a sentence is typically facilitated when it shares lexico-semantic or syntactic features with a previously encountered stimulus. Here, we used fMRI priming to investigate which brain areas show adaptation to the repetition of a sentence's content or syntax. Participants read or listened to sentences organized in series which could or not share similar syntactic constructions and/or lexico-semantic content. The repetition of lexicosemantic content yielded adaptation in most of the temporal and frontal sentence processing network, both in the visual and the auditory modalities, even when the same lexicosemantic content was expressed using variable syntactic constructions. No fMRI adaptation effect was observed when the same syntactic construction was repeated. Yet behavioral priming was observed at both syntactic and semantic levels in a separate experiment where participants detected sentence endings. We discuss a number of possible explanations for the absence of syntactic priming in the fMRI experiments, including the possibility that the conglomerate of syntactic properties defining ''a construction'' is not an actual object assembled during parsing. &
Investigations of the syntax-brain relationship (Doctoral Dissertation)
This dissertation critically examines extant hypotheses on the syntax-brain relationship, particularly proposals concerning Broca’s area, and presents empirical data in efforts to localize syntactic operations in the brain. Chapter 2 of the dissertation reviews arguments for and against a role for Broca’s area in syntax, and presents an fMRI experiment using a construction called backward anaphora in which the activity in the pars triangularis of Broca’s area is shown to pattern with how sentences are processed (i.e., whether the construction involves active processing), and not their syntactic properties (i.e., activity is not contingent on Movement constructions). Chapter 3 extends Dehaene & Cohen’s neuronal recycling hypothesis (Dehaene & Cohen, 2007) to language function in Broca’s area to account for sentence-selective activations in this region of cortex (Fedorenko et al., 2012). In particular, the discussion in Chapter 3 focuses on language- or sentence-specific working memory (Caplan & Waters, 1999), and how language-specific working memory may develop out of domain-general working memory. Chapter 4 presents an fMRI experiment aimed at uncovering the neural basis of syntax using a “syntactic perturbation” technique during overt sentence production. In addition, the experiment specifically examined the response profile of Broca’s area and another region classically implicated in structural processing, the anterior temporal lobe (ATL), to our novel manipulation targeting syntactic structure. The results, when compared to perturbation in a control condition of unstructured word lists, revealed preferential activation for syntactic perturbation in networks previously implicated in motor control (Tourville et al., 2008) and action inhibition (Aron et al., 2014), including the basal ganglia, thalamus, and right inferior frontal gyrus, suggesting that (i) sentence production allows greater phonological/articulatory planning than list production, and (ii) syntax may rely on networks similar to basic motor control. However, effects at the syntax level are conflated with effects at lower motor levels in our experiment. Broca’s area and the ATL did not exhibit effects consistent with syntactic processing, although our results extended the basic finding of increased activation to sentences compared to word lists previously found in the ATL (Mazoyer et al., 1993). Finally, Chapter 5 concludes the dissertation.
The Neural Reality of Syntactic Transformations: Evidence From Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Psychological Science, 2003
The functional anatomy of syntactic transformations, a major computational operation invoked in sentence processing, was identified through a functional magnetic resonance imaging investigation. A grammaticality judgment task was used, presented through a novel hidden-blocks design. Subjects listened to transformational and nontransformational sentences in which a host of other complexity generators (number of words, prepositions, embeddings, etc.)
Neural Correlates for the Acquisition of Natural Language Syntax
Neuroimage, 2002
Some types of simple and logically possible syntactic rule never occur in human language grammars, leading to a distinction between grammatical and nongrammatical syntactic rules. Comparison of the neuroanatomical correlates underlying the acquisition of grammatical and nongrammatical rules can provide relevant evidence on the neural processes dedicated to language acquisition in a given developmental stage. Until present no direct evidence on the neural mechanisms subserving language acquisition at any developmental stage has been supplied. We used fMRI in investigating the acquisition of grammatical and nongrammatical rules in the specified sense in 14 healthy adults. Grammatical rules compared with nongrammatical rules specifically activated a left hemispheric network including Broca's area, as shown by direct comparisons between the two rule types. The selective role of Broca's area was further confirmed by time ؋ condition interactions and by proficiency effects, in that higher proficiency in grammatical rule usage, but not in usage of nongrammatical rules, led to higher levels of activation in this area. These findings provide evidence for the neural mechanisms underlying language acquisition in adults.