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In principle, functional neuroimaging provides uniquely informative data in addressing linguistic questions, because it can indicate distinct processes that are not apparent from behavioral data alone. This could involve adjudicating the source of unacceptability via the different patterns of elicited brain responses to different ungrammatical sentence types. However, it is difficult to interpret brain activations to syntactic violations. Such responses could reflect processes that have nothing intrinsically related to linguistic representations, such as domain-general executive function abilities. To facilitate the potential use of functional neuroimaging methods to identify the source of different syntactic violations, we conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment to identify the brain activation maps associated with two distinct syntactic violation types: phrase structure (created by inverting the order of two adjacent words within a sentence) and subject islands (created by extracting a wh-phrase out of an embedded subject). The comparison of these violations to control sentences surprisingly showed no indication of a generalized violation response, with almost completely divergent activation patterns. Phrase structure violations seemingly activated regions previously implicated in verbal working memory and structural complexity in sentence processing, whereas the subject islands appeared to activate regions previously implicated in conceptual-semantic processing, broadly defined. We review our findings in the context of previous research on syntactic and semantic violations using ERPs. Although our results suggest potentially distinct underlying mechanisms underlying phrase structure and subject island violations, our results are tentative and suggest important methodological considerations for future research in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigated the ability of 40 left-hemisphere brain-lesioned individuals with various diagnoses of aphasia to temporally synchronize the audio of a spoken word to its congruent video using a maximum-likelihood adaptive psychophysical procedure. We found a statistically significant effect of aphasia type, not explained by lesion volume, on measures of audiovisual (AV) synchrony. Brain-lesioned individuals with no symptoms of aphasia, and those with conduction aphasia performed on the synchrony task more similarly to age-matched neurotypical controls, whereas those with anomic aphasia performed the poorest. In addition, we examined the correlation between this ability and AV integration (fusion) and observed a significant correlation between measures of AV synchrony and fusion. An ROI analysis of stroke lesion maps showed that damage to the left posterior temporal regions adversely affected AV processing, although whole-brain univariate lesion-symptom mapping analyses did not yield any significant results. These findings contribute to a better understanding of the functional relationship between different AV processes in multimodal integration and their underlying cortical networks in the human brain., (© 2025 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.)