title: Linguistic prominence and Broca's area: the influence of animacy as a linearization principle.
abstract: Previous neuroimaging findings suggest a sensitivity of the pars opercularis of the left inferior frontal gyrus (i.e. a core subregion of Broca's area) to a number of linguistic dependencies governing the linear sequencing of information in a sentence (e.g. subjects should precede objects; the participant role hierarchy should be respected). The present study used event-related fMRI to examine the hitherto untested hypothesis that the violation of a linearization principle that is purely semantic in nature (animate arguments should precede inanimate arguments) would also lead to increased pars opercularis activation. To this end, we manipulated the features animacy and argument order in German sentences and found a significant increase of activation in the pars opercularis for a violation of the animacy principle even when the other factors mentioned above were controlled for. This result therefore calls for a "supra-syntactic" account of pars opercularis function in the real-time understanding of sentences.
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitve and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany. grewe@staff.uni-marburg.de
authors.forename: Tanja
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Grewe
authors.forename: Ina
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Bornkessel
authors.forename: Stefan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Zysset
authors.forename: Richard
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Wiese
authors.forename: D Yves
authors.initials: DY
authors.lastname: von Cramon
authors.forename: Matthias
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Schlesewsky
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001931:Brain Mapping; D003627:Data Interpretation, Statistical; D005071:Evoked Potentials / Q000502:physiology; D005260:Female; D005625:Frontal Lobe / Q000502:physiology*; D007839:Functional Laterality / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D008606:Mental Processes / Q000502:physiology*; D011578:Psycholinguistics