Brain activation during the course of sentence comprehension.
The purpose of this study is to determine, by functional magnetic resonance imaging, how the activated regions of the brain change as a Japanese sentence is presented in a grammatically correct order. In this study, we presented constituents of a sentence to Japanese participants one by one at regular intervals. The results showed that the left lingual gyrus was significantly activated at the beginning of the sentence, then the left inferior frontal gyrus and left supplementary motor area, in the middle of the sentence, and the left inferior temporal gyrus, at the end of the sentence. We suggest that these brain areas are involved in sentence comprehension in this temporal order.
Ikuta
Naho
N
LBC Research Center, Tohoku University 21st Century of Excellence Program in Humanities, Sendai, Japan. ikuta@idac.tohoku.ac.jp
Sugiura
Motoaki
M
Sassa
Yuko
Y
Watanabe
Jobu
J
Akitsuki
Yuko
Y
Iwata
Kazuki
K
Miura
Naoki
N
Okamoto
Hideyuki
H
Watanabe
Yoshihiko
Y
Sato
Shigeru
S
Horie
Kaoru
K
Matsue
Yoshihiko
Y
Kawashima
Ryuta
R
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001931:Brain Mapping; D002540:Cerebral Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D005625:Frontal Lobe / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D009778:Occipital Lobe / Q000502:physiology; D013702:Temporal Lobe / Q000502:physiology