Left cytoarchitectonic BA 44 processes syntactic gender violations in determiner phrases

Abstract

Recent neuroimaging studies make contradictory predictions about the involvement of left Brodmann's area (BA) 44 in processing local syntactic violations in determiner phrases (DPs). Some studies suggest a role for BA 44 in detecting local syntactic violations, whereas others attribute this function to the left premotor cortex. Therefore, the present event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study investigated whether left-cytoarchitectonic BA 44 was activated when German DPs involving syntactic gender violations were compared with correct DPs (correct: 'der Baum'-the[masculine] tree[masculine]; violated: 'das Baum'--the[neuter] tree[masculine]). Grammaticality judgements were made for both visual and auditory DPs to be able to generalize the results across modalities. Grammaticality judgements involved, among others, left BA 44 and left BA 6 in the premotor cortex for visual and auditory stimuli. Most importantly, activation in left BA 44 was consistently higher for violated than for correct DPs. This finding was behaviourally corroborated by longer reaction times for violated versus correct DPs. Additional brain regions, showing the same effect, included left premotor cortex, supplementary motor area, right middle and superior frontal cortex, and left cerebellum. Based on earlier findings from the literature, the results indicate the involvement of left BA 44 in processing local syntactic violations when these include morphological features, whereas left premotor cortex seems crucial for the detection of local word category violations.

Towards a causal role of Broca’s area in language: A TMS-EEG study on syntactic prediction

“…Our data are compatible with the proposal that phrasal building in Broca's area might be accomplished in a bottom-up fashion (Bhattasali et al, 2019;Nelson et al, 2017), with words being integrated into constituents whilst the linguistic stream unfolds. They also converge on fMRI and TMS data implying bottom-up evaluation of grammatical rules in this region (Carreiras et al, 2010(Carreiras et al, , 2012Heim et al, 2010;Herrmann et al, 2012;Zaccarella & Friederici, 2015a). As such, future studies addressing this neurocognitive hypothesis are awaited to provide further insights into the mechanisms of incremental linguistic composition.…”

“…However, evidence from agreement paradigms suggests that the left IFG might be involved in the bottom-up application of syntactic rules. Increased activity has been observed in the left IFG for agreement violations (Carreiras et al, 2010;Heim et al, 2010) and lesions in this region result in the absence of the ESN in this domain (Jakuszeit et al, 2013). While some authors linked the damage of the left IFG to the generation of predictions (Jakuszeit et al, 2013), the ESN would be absent even if the lesion affected the bottom-up evaluation of grammaticality.…”

Functional and Structural Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Human Language: A Review

“…The first type of grammar refers to the use of embedded sentences, therefore demanding more working memory than the latter, simpler (linear) structures with no nesting. Detecting grammatical errors also tap on BA 44 (e.g., Heim et al, 2010), a result consistent with a role of this area in syntactic working memory to the extent that the detection of errors also increases processing demands. Overall, all these data are in line with a syntactic working memory interpretation as a main role of BA 44 (or the anterior ventral pars opercularis).…”

The neural correlates of agrammatism: Evidence from aphasic and healthy speakers performing an overt picture description task

“…Notable are particularly the effects in the left frontal areas that showed bilaterally but stronger in the left hemisphere. Activation peaks in the IFG and MFG have often been associated with morpho-syntactic encoding like the processing of grammatical gender, gender violations and syntactic and morphological error detection in production and comprehension (Embick et al, 2000 ; Indefrey et al, 2001a , 2004 ; Moro et al, 2001 ; Miceli et al, 2002 ; Friederici et al, 2003 ; Heim, 2008 ; Heim et al, 2010 ). A possible explanation for effects in these areas although function words were omitted might be an intentional suppression of the closed class words after their syntactic encoding to artificially reduce the utterance length.…”

“…Other areas like the superior and middle frontal gyri and posterior parietal regions are likely to play a role in the grammatical processing in language comprehension and production too (e.g., Miceli et al, 2002 ; Kielar et al, 2011 ). Results on the processing of morpho-syntactic violations stem from language comprehension tasks only that described activation in the left pars opercularis (Heim et al, 2010 ), the left posterior frontal operculum, the left anterior superior temporal gyrus (STG) (Friederici et al, 2003 ), and the middle frontal gyrus (MFG) (Indefrey et al, 2001b ).…”