Same words, different structures: An fMRI investigation of argument relations and the angular gyrus

Matchin, William; Liao, Chia-Hsuan; Gaston, Phoebe; Lau, Ellen

doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2019.01.019

Cited by 43 publications

(57 citation statements)

References 68 publications

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“…which have been identified in previous studies of syntactic processing (e.g. Pallier et al, 2011;Matchin et al, 2017;2019). At the group level, these contrasts overlapped in pSTS, suggesting a fairly robust role for this region in syntactic processing.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 73%

“…We defined subject-specific functional ROIs within broader anatomical search spaces (Fedorenko et al, 2010;Rogalsky et al, 2015;Matchin et al, 2019). We first defined two localizer contrasts, orthogonal to our effects of interest, to identify language-selective subregions We then analyzed orthogonal functional dissociations within these regions at the group level, averaging the t-statistic for each condition across the voxels included within the subject-specific ROIs.…”

Section: Fmri Data Collection and Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

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Syntax-sensitive regions of Broca’s area and the posterior temporal lobe are differentially recruited by production and perception

Matchin

Wood

2020

Preprint

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Neuroimaging studies of syntactic processing typically result in similar activation profiles in Broca's area and the posterior temporal lobe (PTL). However, substantial functional dissociations between these regions have been demonstrated with respect to lesion-symptom mapping in aphasia. To account for this, Matchin & Hickok (2020) proposed that both regions play a role in syntactic processing, broadly construed, but attribute distinct functions to these regions with respect to production and comprehension. Here we report an fMRI study designed to test this hypothesis by contrasting the subvocal articulation and comprehension of structured jabberwocky phrases (syntactic), sequences of real words (lexical), and sequences of pseudowords (phonological). We defined two sets of language-selective regions of interest (ROIs) in individual subjects for Broca's area and the PTL using the contrasts [syntactic > lexical] and [syntactic > phonological]. We found robust significant interactions of comprehension and production between these two regions at the syntactic level, for both sets of language-selective ROIs. This suggests a core difference in the function of these regions:language-selective subregions of Broca's area play a role in syntax driven by the demands of production, whereas language-selective subregions of the PTL play a role in syntax driven by the demands of comprehension.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 73%

Section: Fmri Data Collection and Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Syntax-sensitive regions of Broca’s area and the posterior temporal lobe are differentially recruited by production and perception

Matchin

Wood

2020

Preprint

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“…Increased aIFG activation has been observed in previous studies for sentences compared to word 5 lists (Matchin, Liao, et al, 2019;Pallier et al, 2011), ambiguous relative to unambiguous sentences (Vitello et al, 2014) and two-word phrases compared to single words (Schell et al, 2017). The latter authors interpret the role of BA45 in the context of basic semantic composition as tracking the amount of words that can be integrated into context.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 77%

“…In that study, AG (with peak in PGa) showed increased activity for more meaningful relative to less meaningful adjective-noun phrases. Recently, left AG was found for the processing of verb phrases and noun phrases relative to word lists (Matchin, Liao, et al, 2019), providing further evidence for its key role in successful conceptual composition. The functional relevance of the left AG for semantic composition was demonstrated in lesion and neurostimulation studies (Price et al, 2015(Price et al, , 2016.…”

Section: Specific Meaningful Composition Engages the Anterior Ag And mentioning

confidence: 89%

“…Furthermore, it remains unclear whether the previously reported recruitment of brain areas during semantic composition is task-dependent. While some studies explicitly asked subjects to compose the meaning of the stimuli (Bemis & Pylkkänen, 2011;Graves et al, 2010;Price et al, 2015;Schell et al, 2017), others intentionally did not (Graves et al, 2010;Matchin, Brodbeck, et al, 2019;Matchin et al, 2017;Matchin, Liao, et al, 2019;Molinaro et al, 2015). Few studies have directly compared different tasks while keeping the stimulus material similar and different results between studies might thus reflect differences in task processing and demand.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Differential contributions of left-hemispheric language regions to basic semantic composition

Graessner

Zaccarella

Hartwigsen

2019

Preprint

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Semantic composition, i.e. the ability to combine single words to form complex meanings, is a core feature of human language. Despite growing interest in the basis of semantic composition, the neural correlates and the interaction of regions within this network remain a matter of debate.In the present fMRI study, we designed a well controlled two-word paradigm in which phrases only differed along the semantic dimension while keeping syntactic information alike. 33 healthy participants listened to meaningful phrases ("fresh apple"), anomalous phrases ("awake apple") and pseudoword phrases ("awake gufel") while performing both an implicit and an explicit semantic task. We identified neural signatures for distinct processes during basic semantic composition: The general phrasal composition process, which is independent of the plausibility of the resulting phrase, engages a wide-spread left hemispheric network comprising both executive semantic control regions as well as general conceptual representation regions. Within this network, the functional connectivity between the left anterior inferior frontal gyrus, the bilateral pre-supplementary motor area and the posterior angular gyrus specifically increases during meaningful phrasal composition. The anterior angular gyrus, on the other hand, guides more specific compositional processing evaluating phrasal plausibility. Overall, our results were stronger in the explicit task, pointing towards partly task-dependent involvement of the regions.Here we provide a separation between distinct nodes of the semantic network, whose functional contributions depend on the type of compositional process under analysis. For the first time, we show that the angular gyrus may be decomposable into two sub-regions during semantic composition.

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The role of left angular gyrus in the representation of linguistic composition relations

Zhang

Xiang

Wang

2022

Human Brain Mapping

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Language comprehension is compositional: individual words are combined structurally to form larger meaning representations. The neural basis for compositionality is at the center of a growing body of recent research. Previous work has largely used univariate analysis to investigate the question, a technique that could potentially lead to the loss of fined-grained information due to the procedure of averaging over neural responses. In a functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment, the present study examined different types of composition relations in Chinese phrases, using a 1-back composition relation probe (CRP) task and a 1-back word probe (WP) task.We first analyzed the data using the multivariate representation similarity analysis, which better captures the fine-grained representational differences in the stimuli.The results showed that the left angular gyrus (AG) represents different types of composition relations in the CRP task, but no brain areas were identified in the WP task. We also conducted a traditional univariate analysis and found greater activations in the bilateral inferior frontal gyrus in the CRP task relative to the WP task.We discuss the methodological and theoretical implications of our findings in the context of the larger language neural network identified in previous studies. Our findings highlight the role of left AG in representing and distinguishing fine-grained linguistic composition relations.

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Same words, different structures: An fMRI investigation of argument relations and the angular gyrus

Cited by 43 publications

References 68 publications

Syntax-sensitive regions of Broca’s area and the posterior temporal lobe are differentially recruited by production and perception

Syntax-sensitive regions of Broca’s area and the posterior temporal lobe are differentially recruited by production and perception

Differential contributions of left-hemispheric language regions to basic semantic composition

The role of left angular gyrus in the representation of linguistic composition relations

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