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Free keywords:
Neuroimaging; Syntax; Syntax processing; Broca’s Area; Syntactic violations; Word order; Event-related brain potentials
Abstract:
One of the fundamental aspects during sentence comprehension is to analyse sentence structure, that is, to detect the formal dependencies which exist between the elements in a sentence. Accordingly, the question of how this so-called syntactic information is neuronally implemented has become a major topic in neuroimaging research on language in the past decade. Especially, the so-called Broca’s Area and its role in syntactic processing has thereby come into focus. The present paper presents neuroimaging studies which have imployed the most important experimental paradigms in this respect, namely, the processing of sentences with syntactic violations and of sentences with non-canonical word order. We argue that neuronal language processing can only be explained in a dynamic model. In such a model, not only neuronal localisation, but also temporal information needs to be taken into account. This calls for additional evidence from more time sensitive methods, such as event-related potentials.
