The role of the striatum in sentence processing: disentangling syntax from working memory in Huntington's disease.

The role of sub-cortical structures in language processing remains controversial. In particular, it is unclear whether the striatum subserves language-specific processes such as syntax or whether it solely affects language performance via its significant role in executive functioning and/or working memory. Here, in order to address this issue, we attempted to equalize working memory constraints while varying syntactic complexity, to study sentence comprehension in 15 patients with striatal damage, namely Huntington's disease at early stage, and in 15 healthy controls.