Language comprehension interrupted: Both language errors and word degradation activate Broca’s area

A common neural hub resolves syntactic and non-syntactic conflict through cooperation with task-specific networks

“…Young children demonstrate similar challenges revising syntactic misanalyses (Huang, Zheng, Meng, & Snedeker, 2013; Trueswell, Sekerina, Hill, & Logrip, 1999; Weighall, 2008), which may be linked to protracted cognitive control development (Mazuka, Jincho, & Oishi, 2009; Novick et al, 2005; Woodard, Pozzan, & Trueswell, 2016). And, as sketched earlier, neuroimaging findings show co-localization of activity within the LIFG when the same subjects perform a canonical cognitive control task (Stroop, Flanker) and a sentence-processing task involving syntactic conflict (January et al, 2009; van de Meerendonk et al, 2013; Ye & Zhou, 2009). These correlational findings have been bolstered by recent work demonstrating a causal connection between cognitive control procedures and language processing: extensive practice on a cognitive control tasks leads to improved garden-path recovery (Hussey et al, 2016; Novick, Hussey, Teubner-Rhodes, Harbison, & Bunting, 2014); transcranial direct current stimulation of VLPFC mitigates the effects of syntactic ambiguity during real-time processing (Hussey, Ward, Christianson, & Kramer, 2015); and dynamic cognitive control engagement immediately facilitates recovery from misinterpretation during online comprehension (Hsu & Novick, 2016).…”

“…Some findings demonstrate that the same regions within VLPFC, particularly the posterior left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG), routinely activate under conditions of conflict across a variety of tasks, including recognition memory (Milham et al, 2001; Nelson, Reuter-Lorenz, Sylvester, Jonides, & Smith, 2003) and temporal context retrieval (Rajah et al, 2008). Similarly, other investigations of cognitive control during syntactic processing have observed shared neurobiological recruitment when people encounter different types of conflict, implying that both processing components and overlapping neural substrates are commonly used within individuals to resolve conflict across various kinds of linguistic and nonlinguistic tasks (Humphreys & Gennari, 2014; January et al, 2009; Novick, Kan, Trueswell, & Thompson-Schill, 2009; van de Meerendonk et al, 2013; Ye & Zhou, 2009). This consistent overlap in neural recruitment raises the possibility that these ventrolateral pre-frontal areas are multifunctional, reflecting common neurobiological underpinnings that execute domain-general conflict-resolution procedures, including during syntactic processing.…”

“…Though a range of prior neuroimaging, behavioral, and patient data suggest that common cognitive control procedures help language users resolve conflict during sentence comprehension (Hsu & Novick, 2016; Humphreys & Gennari, 2014; January et al, 2009; Novick et al, 2005, 2009; van de Meerendonk et al, 2013; Vuong & Martin, 2011; Ye & Zhou, 2009), other data suggest distinctions in the cognitive control systems that operate over syntactic and non-syntactic material, leading to claims of domain-specificity (Acheson & Hagoort, 2014; Engelhardt et al, 2016; Fedorenko et al, 2012; Vuong & Martin, 2014). Our study tested the effects of increased conflict resolution demands across four diverse tasks, one of which involved syntactic conflict and three of which did not.…”

“…Specifically, the control procedures that operate over syntactic material may be general-purpose in nature, engaging the same prefrontal brain systems that detect and resolve information-conflict in other domains such as recognition memory, when familiar-but-irrelevant memoranda interfere with target identification (as in the doppelgänger example above; Jonides & Nee, 2006; Nee, Jonides, & Berman, 2007). The evidence for such interplay comes from studies demonstrating co-localized brain activity during syntactic and non-syntactic cognitive control (January, Trueswell, & Thompson-Schill, 2009; van de Meerendonk, Rueschemeyer, & Kolk, 2013; Ye & Zhou, 2009). However, others have argued that language is cognitively and thus neurobiologically distinctive, evidenced by findings of unique activation sites in the same regions for syntactic versus non-syntactic contrasts (e.g., Ben-Shachar, Hendler, Kahn, Ben-Bashat, & Grodzinsky, 2003; Blank, Kanwisher, & Fedorenko, 2014; Embick, Marantz, Miyashita, O’Neil, & Sakai, 2000; Grodzinsky, 2000).…”

Lateralized task shift effects in Broca's and Wernicke's regions and in visual word form area are selective for conceptual content and reflect trial history

“…Pseudowords, on the other hand, generate greater activation than real words (Fiebach et al, 2002), again suggesting that unexpected words or words that are difficult to understand yield greater activation. Along the same lines, Broca's region has been found to increase activation to degraded visual word features (visual word form) as well as to decreased plausibility based on world knowledge (van de Meerendonk et al, 2013). More generally, it has been found that Broca's region activation is positively correlated with response time during linguistic processing (Christensen and Wallentin, 2011;Kristensen and Wallentin, in press;Orfanidou et al, 2006;Wallentin et al, 2006).…”