Journal
BRAIN AND LANGUAGE
Volume 138, Issue -, Pages 1-11Publisher
ACADEMIC PRESS INC ELSEVIER SCIENCE
DOI: 10.1016/j.bandl.2014.09.001
Keywords
Syntax; Sentence processing; fMRI; Left inferior frontal gyrus; Broca's area; Prediction; Cognitive control; Syntactic movement; Anaphora; English
Funding
- NIH [DC03681]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Accounts of the role of Broca's area in sentence comprehension range from specific syntactic operations to domain-general processes. The present study was designed to tease apart these two general accounts by measuring the BOLD response to two syntactically distinct long-distance dependencies that invoke abstractly similar predictive processes: backward anaphora and filler-gap dependencies. Previous research has observed distance effects in Broca's area for filler-gap dependencies, but not canonical anaphora, which has been interpreted in support of a syntactic movement account. However, filler-gap dependencies engage predictive mechanisms, resulting in active search for the gap, while canonical anaphora do not. Backward anaphora correct for this asymmetry as they engage a predictive mechanism that parallels the active search in filler-gap dependencies. The results revealed a distance effect in the pars triangularis of Broca's area for the backward anaphora condition, supporting a prediction-based role for this region rather than one for a particular syntactic operation. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available