Syntactic processing of complex sentences in left lateral premotor cortex.
We used functional MRI to investigate roles of left lateral premotor cortex in syntactic processing of complex sentences. Participants read left-branching (LB), center-embedded (CE), and active-conjoined (AC) sentences to determine noun-verb relationships. The main clause of CE sentences was interrupted by a relative clause, requiring noun-phrases to be maintained in the syntactic buffer until integration with verbs into sentences, whereas noun-phrases were sequentially assigned to verbs in LB/AC. Findings revealed selectively increased activation in the left premotor cortex for CE with no significant difference between LB and AC, indicating that left premotor activity is not related to general syntactic complexity, but is specific to processing of CE structure, requiring greater load in the syntactic buffer or integration cost.
Ogawa
Kenji
K
ERATO Asada Synergistic Intelligence Project, Japan Science and Technology Agency, Japan. ogawa@cog.ist.i.kyoto-u.ac.jp
Inui
Toshio
T
Ohba
Masato
M
D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D007839:Functional Laterality / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D009044:Motor Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011932:Reading; D012660:Semantics; D014825:Vocabulary