Negative sentences exhibit a sustained effect in delayed verification tasks.

Negated sentences are known to be more cognitively taxing than positive ones (i.e., polarity effect).

Stable brain loci for the processing of complex syntax: A review of the current neuroimaging evidence.

We conducted a retrospective review of fMRI studies of complex syntax, in order to study the stability of the neural bases of mechanisms engaged in syntactic processing. Our review set out rigorous selection criteria of studies which we discuss, including transparency and minimality of the contrasts between stimuli, and the presence of whole brain analyses corrected for multiple comparisons. Seventeen studies with 316 participants survived our sieve.

Logical negation mapped onto the brain.

High-level cognitive capacities that serve communication, reasoning, and calculation are essential for finding our way in the world. But whether and to what extent these complex behaviors share the same neuronal substrate are still unresolved questions. The present study separated the aspects of logic from language and numerosity-mental faculties whose distinctness has been debated for centuries-and identified a new cytoarchitectonic area as correlate for an operation involving logical negation.

The processing of polar quantifiers, and numerosity perception.

We investigated the course of language processing in the context of a verification task that required numerical estimation and comparison. Participants listened to sentences with complex quantifiers that contrasted in Polarity, a logical property (e.g.

An fMRI study dissociating distance measures computed by Broca's area in movement processing: clause boundary vs. identity.

Behavioral studies of sentence comprehension suggest that processing long-distance dependencies is subject to interference effects when Noun Phrases (NP) similar to the dependency head intervene in the dependency. Neuroimaging studies converge in localizing such effects to Broca's area, showing that activity in Broca's area increases with the number of NP interveners crossed by a moved NP of the same type. To test if NP interference effects are modulated by adding an intervening clause boundary, which should by hypothesis increase the number of successive-cyclic movements, we conducted an fMRI study contrasting NP interveners with clausal (CP) interveners.

The time course of neurolinguistic and neuropsychological symptoms in three cases of logopenic primary progressive aphasia.

Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is a rare clinical dementia syndrome affecting predominantly language abilities. Word-finding difficulties and comprehension deficits despite relatively preserved cognitive functions are characteristic symptoms during the first two years, and distinguish PPA from other dementia types like Alzheimer's disease. However, the dynamics of changes in language and non-linguistic abilities are not well understood.

The language-number interface in the brain: a complex parametric study of quantifiers and quantities.

The neural bases for numerosity and language are of perennial interest. In monkeys, neural separation of numerical Estimation and numerical Comparison has been demonstrated. As linguistic and numerical knowledge can only be compared in humans, we used a new fMRI paradigm in an attempt to dissociate Estimation from Comparison, and at the same time uncover the neural relation between numerosity and language.

Processing noncanonical sentences in broca's region: reflections of movement distance and type.

Various noncanonical sentence constructions are derived from basic sentence structures by a phrase displacement called Movement. The moved phrase (filler) leaves a silent copy at the extracted position (gap) and is reactivated when the hearer/reader passes over the gap. Consequently, memory operations are assumed to occur to establish the filler-gap link.

Broca's area and sentence comprehension: a relationship parasitic on dependency, displacement or predictability?

The current rapid event-related fMRI study used optional parasitic-gap constructions, such as [Which paper] did the tired student submit [(gap)--] after reviewing [(p-gap)--/it]?, to test 3 potential roles for Broca's area in sentence processing. These 3 functional options are: I. any intra-sentential Dependency relation activates Broca's area.

The picture of the linguistic brain: how sharp can it be? Reply to Fedorenko & Kanwisher.

What is the best way to learn how the brain analyzes linguistic input? Two popular methods have attempted to segregate and localize linguistic processes: analyses of language deficits subsequent to (mostly focal) brain disease, and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) in health. A recent Compass article by Fedorenko and Kanwisher (FK, 2009) observes that these methods group together data from many individuals through methods that rely on variable anatomical landmarks, and that results in a murky picture of how language is represented in the brain. To get around the variability problem, FK propose to import into neurolinguistics a method that has been successfully used in vision research - one that locates functional Regions Of Interest (fROIs) in each individual brain.

fMRI adaptation dissociates syntactic complexity dimensions.

The current fMRI adaptation study sought to elucidate the dimensions of syntactic complexity and their underlying neural substrates. For the first time with fMRI, we investigated repetition suppression (i.e.

The on-line processing of verb-phrase ellipsis in aphasia.

We investigate the on-line processing of verb-phrase ellipsis (VPE) constructions in two brain injured populations: Broca's and Anomic aphasics. VPE constructions are built from two simple clauses; the first is the antecedent clause and the second is the ellipsis clause. The ellipsis clause is missing its verb and object (i.

The battle for Broca's region.

The intense effort to characterize Broca's region has produced many views on its anatomy and function. Here, we present the leading approaches and consider ways to adjudicate among them empirically. Anatomically, we focus on the cytoarchitecture of Brodmann areas 44 and 45, which constitute Broca's region.

Working memory and syntax interact in Broca's area.

Comprehension of filler-gap dependency relations (as in this is the man who the woman is touching) is supported by Broca's area. There are two views regarding the processing role of this brain region in comprehending these dependencies. Specifists hold that Broca's area plays a specific syntactic role in processing filler-gaps.

Taxing working memory with syntax: bihemispheric modulations.

Motivated by claims that relegate the syntactic functions of Broca's region to working memory (WM) and not to language-specific mechanisms, we conducted an fMRI and an aphasia study that featured two varieties of intrasentential dependency relations: One was syntactic movement (e.g., Which boy does the girl think [symbol in text] examined Steven?), the other was antecedent-reflexive binding (e.

The language faculty, Broca's region, and the mirror system.

Examples of three types of empirical arguments are given for the modularity of language mechanisms in Broca's region, and against a unified account of the functional role of this region and of the ventral precentral sulcus (vPCS). These are (a) pure syntactic considerations, (b) observations on the comprehension performance of Broca's aphasics, (c) recent fMRI results from receptive tasks at the sentence level.

Neuroimaging of syntax and syntactic processing.

Recent results challenge and refine the prevailing view of the way language is represented in the human brain. Syntactic knowledge and processing mechanisms that implement syntax in use are mapped onto neural tissue in experiments that harness both syntactic concepts and imaging technologies to the study of brain mechanisms in healthy and impaired populations. In the emerging picture, syntax is neurologically segregated, and its component parts are housed in several distinct cerebral loci that extend beyond the traditional ones - Broca's and Wernicke's regions in the left hemisphere.

A new empirical angle on the variability debate: quantitative neurosyntactic analyses of a large data set from Broca's aphasia.

Behavioral variation in Broca's aphasia has been characterized as boundless, calling into question the validity of the syndrome-based schema and related diagnostic methods of acquired language disorders. More generally, this putative variability has cast serious doubts on the feasibility of localizing linguistic operations in cortex. We present a new approach to the quantitative analysis of deficient linguistic performance, and apply it to a large data set, constructed from the published literature: Comprehension data of 69 carefully selected Broca's aphasic patients, tested on nearly 6000 stimulus sentences, were partitioned in different ways, and subjected to a series of analyses.

Neural correlates of syntactic movement: converging evidence from two fMRI experiments.

This paper studies neural processes of sentence comprehension, focusing on a specific syntactic operation-syntactic movement. We describe two fMRI experiments that manipulate this particular syntactic component. The sentences in each of the experiments are different, yet the structural contrast in both is syntactically identical, comparing movement and no-movement sentences.

The neural reality of syntactic transformations: evidence from functional magnetic resonance imaging.

The functional anatomy of syntactic transformations, a major computational operation invoked in sentence processing, was identified through a functional magnetic resonance imaging investigation. A grammaticality judgment task was used, presented through a novel hidden-blocks design. Subjects listened to transformational and nontransformational sentences in which a host of other complexity generators (number of words, prepositions, embeddings, etc.