Comprehending the topic of a paragraph: a functional imaging study of a complex language process

Abstract

This study uses fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) to investigate the brain activity in a set of cortical areas in the task of main idea identification, when the topic sentence was presented in first versus in last position in a three-sentence paragraph. The participants were eight right-handed undergraduate students from Carnegie Mellon University, six male and 2 female, all native speakers of English. Each participant read twelve paragraphs, six in which the topic sentence was paragraph initial and six in which it was paragraph final, and each paragraph was presented word by word in the center of a screen, inside the scanner. The major finding of the current study is the differential response observed in the left and right hemispheres as to the location of the topic sentence within the paragraph. The left temporal region showed greater activation when the topic sentence was in final position than in initial position. The right temporal region, on the other hand, was affected only by sentence type, showing a greater response to topic sentences than support sentences, regardless of their location within the paragraph. KEY-WORDS: FMRI; Main idea identification; Discourse processing. RESUMO:Este estudo utiliza a ressonância magnética funcional para investigar a atividade cerebral em áreas corticais durante a execução da tarefa de extração de idéias principais, quando a idéia principal é apresentada no início ou ao final de um parágrafo com três orações. Os participantes da pesquisa foram oito alunos de graduação da Universidade de Carnegie Mellon, todos destros, falantes nativos do inglês. Cada participante leu doze parágrafos, seis com a idéia principal no início e seis com a idéia principal no final do parágrafo, e cada parágrafo foi apresentado palavra por palavra, A., 24:2, 2008 (175-197) 176 D.E.L.T.A., 24:2 no centro de uma tela, dentro do aparelho de ressonância magnética. O maior achado do presente estudo refere-se à resposta diferenciada observada nos hemisférios direito e esquerdo. A região temporal esquerda mostrou maior atividade cerebral quando a idéia principal era apresentada em posição final do que em posição inicial. A região temporal direita, por sua vez, só foi afetada pelo tipo de oração, mostrando uma maior atividade durante o processamento da idéia principal do que das idéias secundárias, independente da sua posição no parágrafo, inicial ou final. PALAVRAS-CHAVE: Ressonância magnética funcional; Identificação de idéias principais; Processamento textual.

Inference making while reading narrative and expository texts: an ERP study

“…For the process of inference making, clinical and brain lesion literature and, more recently, neuroimaging evidence, suggest that some areas of the right hemisphere (e.g., inferior and middle temporal sulcus, inferior frontal gyrus and inferior parietal areas) are particularly involved in the process of inference generation (Mason & Just, 2004;St. George, Kutas, Martines, & Sereno, 1999;Tomitch, Newman, Carpenter, & Just, 2008). The present study further investigated the process of inference making, using EEG, in order to verify the differences in right and left brain processing while subjects read two different types of texts, namely exposition and narration.…”

Inference making while reading narrative and expository texts: An ERP study.

“…For the process of inference making, clinical and brain lesion literature and, more recently, neuroimaging evidence, suggest that some areas of the right hemisphere (e.g., inferior and middle temporal sulcus, inferior frontal gyrus and inferior parietal areas) are particularly involved in the process of inference generation (Mason & Just, 2004; St. George, Kutas, Martines, & Sereno, 1999; Tomitch, Newman, Carpenter, & Just, 2008). The present study further investigated the process of inference making, using EEG, in order to verify the differences in right and left brain processing while subjects read two different types of texts, namely exposition and narration.…”