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Syntactic structure building in the anterior temporal lobe during natural story listening |
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| Authors: | Jonathan Brennan Yuval NirUri Hasson Rafael MalachDavid J Heeger Liina Pylkkänen |
| Institution: | a Department of Linguistics, New York University, New York, NY 10003, USA b Department of Psychiatry, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI 53719, USA c Department of Psychology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08540, USA d Neuroscience Institute, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08540, USA e Department of Neurobiology, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel f Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY 10003, USA g Center for Neural Science, New York University, New York, NY 10003, USA |
| Abstract: | The neural basis of syntax is a matter of substantial debate. In particular, the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), or Broca’s area, has been prominently linked to syntactic processing, but the anterior temporal lobe has been reported to be activated instead of IFG when manipulating the presence of syntactic structure. These findings are difficult to reconcile because they rely on different laboratory tasks which tap into distinct computations, and may only indirectly relate to natural sentence processing. Here we assessed neural correlates of syntactic structure building in natural language comprehension, free from artificial task demands. Subjects passively listened to Alice in Wonderland during functional magnetic resonance imaging and we correlated brain activity with a word-by-word measure of the amount syntactic structure analyzed. Syntactic structure building correlated with activity in the left anterior temporal lobe, but there was no evidence for a correlation between syntactic structure building and activity in inferior frontal areas. Our results suggest that the anterior temporal lobe computes syntactic structure under natural conditions. |
| Keywords: | Language Neuroimaging Syntax aTL |
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