An fMRI study of canonical and noncanonical word order in German

Abstract

Understanding a complex sentence requires the processing of information at different (e.g., phonological, semantic, and syntactic) levels, the intermediate storage of this information and the unification of this information to compute the meaning of the sentence information. The present investigation homed in on two aspects of sentence processing: working memory and reanalysis. Event-related functional MRI was used in 12 healthy native speakers of German, while they read sentences. Half of the sentences had unambiguous initial noun-phrases (masculine nominative, masculine accusative) and thus signaled subject-first (canonical) or object-first (noncanonical) sentences. Noncanonical unambiguous sentences were supposed to entail greater demand on working memory, because of their more complex syntactic structure. The other half of the sentences had case-ambiguous initial noun-phrases (feminine gender). Only the second unambiguous noun-phrase (eighth position in the sentences) revealed, whether a canonical or noncanonical word order was present. Based on previous data it was hypothesized that ambiguous noncanonical sentences required a recomputation of the sentence, as subjects would initially commit to a subject first reading. In the respective contrasts two main areas of brain activation were observed. Unambiguous noncanonical sentences elicited more activation in left inferior frontal cortex relative unambiguous canonical sentences. This was interpreted in conjunction with the greater demands on working memory in the former condition. For noncanonical ambiguous relative to canonical ambiguous sentences, an activation of the left supramarginal gyrus was revealed, which was interpreted as a reflection of the reanalysis-requirements induced by this condition.

Revisiting the scrambling complexity hypothesis in sentence processing: a self-paced reading study on anomaly detection and scrambling in Hindi

“…Here again, it could be the case that locality, the proximity of the subject and the verb resulted in better processing and needed less working memory resources compared to a SOV or a OSV structure. The participants may have detected the anomaly much before the ending with SVO sentences, which may have been delayed for other types of sentence due to larger demand in working memory resources (Bahlmann, Rodriguez-Fornells, Rotte, & Munte, 2007). In case of the OVS structure, even though the subject and the verb are together, the object initial processing makes it difficult as shown in earlier studies on object-first processing (Mishra, 2007) in spite of adjacency of subject and verb.…”

Neural Correlates of Syntactic Processing in the Nonfluent Variant of Primary Progressive Aphasia

“…Relatedly, there are different aspects to syntactic complexity that are usually correlated, such as syntactic movement, hierarchical complexity, verbal working memory, and re-analysis. Some researchers have attempted to distinguish between the neural correlates of these different aspects of syntactic complexity (Caplan and Waters, 1999; Grewe et al, 2005; Amici et al, 2007; Bahlmann et al, 2007; Peelle et al, 2008; Makuuchi et al, 2009), but we did not attempt to do so. Although we matched sentence length, lexical content, and point of disambiguation, thus ruling out superficial differences between conditions, our measure of complexity still encompasses several syntactic and non-syntactic factors.…”

Co-localizing linguistic and musical syntax with intracranial EEG

“…Likewise, the involvement of the IFG, anterior insula, ventral PrCG, and STG has been frequently shown during the processing of harmonic irregularities (Kim et al, 2011;Koelsch et al, 2001Koelsch et al, , 2002Koelsch et al, , 2005bMaess et al, 2001;Minati et al, 2008;Sammler et al, 2011;Tillmann et al, 2003Tillmann et al, , 2006, and the processing of music-syntactic relations in melodies (Krumhansl, 2004;Platel et al, 1997;Schmithorst, 2005;Zatorre et al, 1994). Finally, also the supramarginal gyrus and inferior parietal lobe are well-known constituents of the neural networks processing musical (Foster and Zatorre, 2010;Koelsch et al, 2005b;Platel et al, 1997;Schmithorst, 2005;Tillmann et al, 2003) and linguistic material (Bahlmann et al, 2007;Corina et al, 1999;Demonet et al, 2005;Price, 2010;Ravizza et al, 2004), most often associated with working memory for pitch (Gaab et al, 2003;Koelsch et al, 2009;Schulze et al, 2011;Vines et al, 2006) and working memory for verbal information (Buchsbaum and D'Esposito, 2009;Henson et al, 2000;Hickok et al, 2003;Paulesu et al, 1993).…”