Grammatical categories in the fronto-temporal language network
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1
University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
Bilateral fronto-temporal systems play a key role in speech comprehension. Their activation is modulated by variations in the complexity of the incoming input, such that an increase in linguistic complexity of a spoken word (e.g. regular inflectional morpheme, play+ed) triggers stronger fronto-temporal interactions in the left hemisphere (Bozic et al., 2010). In the current fMRI study we contrasted the effects of increased linguistic complexity in verbs, which have rich morpho-syntactic paradigms, with parallel increases in nouns. Participants heard unique or dominant verbs and nouns, presented as bare stems (e.g. sing, rug), inflected forms (e.g. sings, rugs) or short phrases (e.g. I sing, a rug). A combination of univariate and multivariate analyses was used to test for the effects of these increases. Consistent with previous results using written words (Tyler et al., 2008), increases in linguistic complexity resulted in left-lateralised perisylvian activation for verbs. Next, we used multivariate Representational Similarity Analysis (RSA; Kriegeskorte et al., 2008) to correlate the patterns of activation across multiple voxels in bilateral fronto-temporal regions with measures of verb syntactic complexity obtained using natural language processing techniques. The results showed that the measures of verb complexity correlated significantly with the activation patterns for inflected forms in L BA44 and L STG / MTG, and with the activation for phrases in bilateral STG / MTG. These measures did not correlate with activation patterns for isolated stems in any fronto-temporal region. The results suggest that verbs’ intrinsic syntactic properties interact with different increases in linguistic complexity to determine the response of the fronto-temporal language network.
Keywords:
Language,
Speech
Conference:
XI International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON XI), Palma, Mallorca, Spain, 25 Sep - 29 Sep, 2011.
Presentation Type:
Poster Presentation
Topic:
Poster Sessions: Neural Bases of Language
Citation:
Bozic
M,
Fonteneau
E,
Tyler
LK,
Devereux
B,
Buttery
P and
Marslen-Wilson
W
(2011). Grammatical categories in the fronto-temporal language network.
Conference Abstract:
XI International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON XI).
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2011.207.00193
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Received:
19 Nov 2011;
Published Online:
28 Nov 2011.
*
Correspondence:
Dr. Mirjana Bozic, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom, mb383@cam.ac.uk