Randomization tests
Effects of Syntactic Structure and Propositional Number on Patterns of Regional Cerebral Blood Flow
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
Sentence reading: A functional mri study at 4 tesla
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
Neural Correlates of Syntactic Processing in Two-Year-Olds
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
Neural Correlates of Syntactic Ambiguity in Sentence Comprehension for Low and High Span Readers
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
An fMRI Study of Syntactic Adaptation
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
Distinct Patterns of Neural Modulation during the Processing of Conceptual and Syntactic Anomalies
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
Repetition Suppression for Spoken Sentences and the Effect of Task Demands
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
Syntactic and Semantic Modulation of Neural Activity during Auditory Sentence Comprehension
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
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Extracting meaning from speech requires the use of pragmatic, semantic, and syntactic information. A central question is: Does the processing of these different types of linguistic information have common or distinct neuroanatomical substrates? We addressed this issue using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure neural activity when subjects listened to spoken normal sentences contrasted with sentences that had either (A) pragmatical, (B) semantic (selection restriction), or (C) syntactic (subcategorical) violations sentences. All three contrasts revealed robust activation of the left-inferior-temporal/fusiform gyrus. Activity in this area was also observed in a combined analysis of all three experiments, suggesting that it was modulated by all three types of linguistic violation. Planned statistical comparisons between the three experiments revealed (1) a greater difference between conditions in activation of the left-superior-temporal gyrus for the pragmatic experiment than the semantic/syntactic experiments; (2) a greater difference between conditions in activation of the right-superior and middle-temporal gyrus in the semantic experiment than in the syntactic experiment; and (3) no regions activated to a greater degree in the syntactic experiment than in the semantic experiment. These data show that, while left- and right-superior-temporal regions may be differentially involved in processing pragmatic and lexico-semantic information within sentences, the left-inferior-temporal/fusiform gyrus is involved in processing all three types of linguistic information. We suggest that this region may play a key role in using pragmatic, semantic (selection restriction), and subcategorical information to construct a higher representation of meaning of sentences.