Journal
BRAIN AND LANGUAGE
Volume 141, Issue -, Pages 124-134Publisher
ACADEMIC PRESS INC ELSEVIER SCIENCE
DOI: 10.1016/j.bandl.2014.12.003
Keywords
Left anterior temporal lobe; Semantics; Composition; MEG
Funding
- National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada
- Fonds de recherche du Quebec-Nature et technologies
- National Science Foundation [BCS-0545186, BCS-1221723]
- NYUAD Institute [G1001]
- New York University Abu Dhabi
- Whitehead Fellowship for Junior Faculty Biomedical and Biological Sciences
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Neurolinguistic investigations into the processing of structured sentences as well as simple adjective-noun phrases point to the left anterior temporal lobe (LATL) as a leading candidate for basic linguistic composition. Here, we characterized the combinatory profile of the LATL over a variety of syntactic and semantic environments, and across two languages, English and Arabic. The contribution of the LATL was investigated across two types of composition: the optional modification of a predicate (modification) and the satisfaction of a predicate's argument position (argument saturation). Target words were presented during MEG recordings, either in combinatory contexts (e.g. eats meat) or in non-combinatory contexts (preceded by an unpronounceable consonant string, e.g. xqkr meat). Across both languages, the LATL showed increased responses to words in combinatory contexts, an effect that was robust to composition type and word order. Together with related findings, these results solidify the role of the LATL in basic semantic composition. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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