Activation of Broca's area by syntactic processing under conditions of concurrent articulation

Abstract

Regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) was measured with positron emission tomography (PET) when 11 subjects made plausibility judgments about written sentences that varied in their syntactic complexity. While making their judgments, subjects uttered the word "double" aloud at a rate of one utterance per second to inhibit their ability to rehearse the sentences. Blood flow increased in Broca's area when subjects made judgments about the more complex sentences. This result replicates and extends previous findings that blood flow increases in this region when subjects process complex syntax under no interference conditions. The results of this experiment provide strong evidence that the increase in blood flow seen in Broca's area in association with processing syntactically complex structures is not due to subvocal rehearsal of those structures, but rather results from processing syntactic forms themselves.

FMRI reveals brain regions mediating slow prosodic modulations in spoken sentences

“…This finding agrees with several recent neuroimaging studies that also report only minor activation in the inferior frontal cortex during auditory sentence comprehension [Dehaene et al, 1997;Mazoyer et al, 1993;Meyer et al, 2000;Mü ller et al, 1997;Schlosser et al, 1998;Scott et al, 2000]. A selective engagement of left inferior cortex, i.e., Broca's area, is reported by studies that investigated the processing of syntactic information during auditory and written sentence comprehension thereby focussing on syntactic complexity [Caplan et al, 1998[Caplan et al, , 2000. In the present experiment the syntactic speech condition also involved syntactic processing but focussed on a different aspect.…”

A neural correlate of syntactic encoding during speech production

“…Although this observation might be taken as support for the notion of a common syntactic processor, other locations reported for syntactic comprehension are several centimeters away (25)(26)(27). Investigation of encoding and parsing of identical syntactic structures in the same subjects is needed to come to firm conclusions on this question.…”

Premotor cortex in observing erroneous action: an fMRI study

“…Moreover, in contrast to correct action, the [10,12,19,37]. Likewise, fMRI studies report BA 6 to be observation of movement error yielded a statistically activated when sequential errors are detected in target significant activation bias towards the left hemisphere.…”