Response of anterior temporal cortex to syntactic and prosodic manipulations during sentence processing

Previous research has implicated a portion of the anterior temporal cortex in sentence-level processing. This region activates more to sentences than to word-lists, sentences in an unfamiliar language, and environmental sound sequences. The current study sought to identify the relative contributions of syntactic and prosodic processing to anterior temporal activation. We presented auditory stimuli where the presence of prosodic and syntactic structure was independently manipulated during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Three structural conditions included normal sentences, sentences with scrambled word order, and lists of content words. These three classes of stimuli were presented either with sentence prosody or with flat supra-lexical (list-like) prosody. Sentence stimuli activated a portion of the left anterior temporal cortex in the superior temporal sulcus (STS) and extending into the middle temporal gyrus, independent of prosody, and to a greater extent than any of the other conditions. An interaction between the structural conditions and prosodic conditions was seen in a more dorsal region of the anterior temporal lobe bilaterally along the superior temporal gyrus (STG). A post-hoc analysis revealed that this region responded either to syntactically structured stimuli or to nonstructured stimuli with sentence-like prosody. The results suggest a parcellation of anterior temporal cortex into 1) an STG region that is sensitive both to the presence of syntactic information and is modulated by prosodic manipulations (in nonsyntactic stimuli); and 2) a more inferior left STS/MTG region that is more selective for syntactic structure.