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• Sentence comprehension does rely on overall verbal short-term memory (vSTM) capacity. • Increases in syntactic complexity reduce the influence of vSTM on correct comprehension of the sentence, suggesting a language-specific resource. • Lesions in the left anterior temporal lobe increase the difficulties to resolve increasingly complex syntactic structure, which is a language-specific competence. Sentence comprehension requires the integration of linguistic units presented in a temporal sequence based on a non-linear underlying syntactic structure. While it is uncontroversial that storage is mandatory for this process, there are opposing views regarding the relevance of general short-term-/working-memory capacities (STM/WM) versus language specific resources. Here we report results from 43 participants with an acquired brain lesion in the extended left hemispheric language network and resulting language deficits, who performed a sentence-to-picture matching task and an experimental task assessing phonological short-term memory. The sentence task systematically varied syntactic complexity (embedding depth and argument order) while lengths, number of propositions and plausibility were kept constant. Clinical data including digit-/ block-spans and lesion size and site were additionally used in the analyses. Correlational analyses confirm that performance on STM/WM-tasks (experimental task and digit-span) are the only two relevant predictors for correct sentence-picture-matching, while reaction times only depended on age and lesion size. Notably increasing syntactic complexity reduced the correlational strength speaking for the additional recruitment of language specific resources independent of more general verbal STM/WM capacities, when resolving complex syntactic structure. The complementary lesion-behaviour analysis yielded different lesion volumes correlating with either the sentence-task or the STM-task. Factoring out STM measures lesions in the anterior temporal lobe correlated with a larger decrease in accuracy with increasing syntactic complexity. We conclude that overall sentence comprehension depends on STM/WM capacity, while increases in syntactic complexity tax another independent cognitive resource. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • We compared bilateral tDCS to left anodal and right cathodal tDCS over IFG. • tDCS did not show any significant effects at either single-word or sentence level. • The null result contributes to debates on tDCS and language in healthy individuals. Abstract Patient studies and brain stimulation evidence suggest that language processing can be enhanced by altering the interhemispheric balance: namely, preferentially enhancing left-hemisphere activity while suppressing right-hemisphere activity. To our knowledge, no study has yet compared the effects of such bilateral brain stimulation to both logically necessary control conditions (separate left- and right-hemisphere stimulation). This study did so in a between-group sham-controlled design, applying transcranial direct current stimulation over Broca's area and/or its homologue in 72 healthy participants. The effects were measured not only in a single-word-level task but also in a sentence-level task, rarely tested previously. We did not find either any significant overall effects of stimulation or greater stimulation effects in the bilateral compared to control groups. This null result, obtained in a large sample, contributes to the debate on whether tDCS can modulate language processing in healthy individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A key issue in the area of language processing is the mechanism underlying the processing of animacy information during sentence comprehension. In this ERP study, we investigated the temporal dynamics of animacy processing in Korean noun-classifier combinations that do not involve verb-noun thematic processing. We manipulated semantic and animacy relationships between nouns and their following classifiers, and there were three conditions in our experiment: (a) correct, (b) semantic mismatch, or (c) animacy mismatch. The results showed that both noun-classifier mismatch conditions evoked a biphasic N400-P600 effect, but there was no P600 difference between the two mismatch conditions. However, further analyses indicated that the animacy mismatch condition evoked a less negative-going waveform than the semantic mismatch condition in the 400-500 ms time window. Our findings suggest that the brain processes animacy information differently from other semantic features in noun-classifier combinations in Korean, and additional animacy mismatch blocked further fine-grained semantic processing. The ERP evidence also suggests that the role of animacy in sentence comprehension varies according to language type and sentence structure. Whether animacy participates in the construction of verb-noun thematic relationships in sentences may be an important factor that influences the neural patterns of animacy processing in language comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We tested the possibility of enhancing natural language comprehension through the application of anodal tDCS (a-tDCS) over the left inferior frontal gyrus, a key region for verbal short-term memory and language comprehension. We designed a between subjects sham- and task-controlled study. During tDCS stimulation, participants performed a sentence to picture matching task in which targets were sentences with different load on short-term memory. Regardless of load on short-term memory, the Anodal group performed significantly better than the Sham group, thus providing evidence that a-tDCS over LIFG enhances natural language comprehension. To our knowledge, we apply for the first time tDCS to boost sentence comprehension. This result is of special interest also from a clinical perspective: applying a-tDCS in patients manifesting problems at the sentence level due to brain damage could enhance the effects of behavioral rehabilitation procedures aimed to improve language comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A critical component of comprehending language in context is identifying the entities that individual linguistic expressions refer to. While previous research has shown that language comprehenders resolve reference quickly and incrementally, little is currently known about the neural basis of successful reference resolution. Using source localized MEG, we provide evidence across 3 experiments and 2 languages that successful reference resolution in simple visual displays is associated with increased activation in the medial parietal lobe. In each trial, participants saw a simple visual display containing three objects which constituted the referential domain. Target referential expressions were embedded in questions about the displays. By varying the displays, we manipulated referential status while keeping the linguistic expressions constant. Follow-up experiments addressed potential interactions of reference resolution with linguistic predictiveness and pragmatic plausibility. Notably, we replicated the effect in Arabic, a language that differs in a structurally informative way from English while keeping referential aspects parallel to our two English studies. Distributed minimum norm estimates of MEG data consistently indicated that reference resolution is associated with increased activity in the medial parietal lobe. With one exception, the timing of the onset of the medial parietal response fell into a mid-latency time-window at 350–500 ms after the onset of the resolving word. Through concurrent EEG recordings on a subset of subjects we also describe the EEG topography of the effect of reference resolution, which makes the result available for comparison with a larger existing literature. Our results extend previous reports that medial parietal lobe is involved in referential language processing, indicating that it is relevant for reference resolution to individual referents, and suggests avenues for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing body of literature supports a key role of fronto-striatal circuits in language perception. It is now known that the striatum plays a role in engaging attentional resources and linguistic rule computation while also serving phonological short-term memory capabilities. The ventral semantic and the dorsal phonological stream dichotomy assumed for spoken language processing also seems to play a role in cortico-striatal perception. Based on recent studies that correlate deep Broca-striatal pathways with complex syntax performance, we used a previously developed computational model of frontal-striatal syntax circuits and hypothesized that different parallel language pathways may contribute to canonical and non-canonical sentence comprehension separately. We modified and further analyzed a thematic role assignment task and corresponding reservoir computing model of language circuits, as previously developed by Dominey and coworkers. We examined the models performance under various parameter regimes, by influencing how fast the presented language input decays and altering the temporal dynamics of activated word representations. This enabled us to quantify canonical and non-canonical sentence comprehension abilities. The modeling results suggest that separate cortico-cortical and cortico-striatal circuits may be recruited differently for processing syntactically more difficult and less complicated sentences. Alternatively, a single circuit would need to dynamically and adaptively adjust to syntactic complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Orthographic neighbors yield reduced N400 in high constraint sentences (replication). • Lexicality does not affect N400 amplitude in high constraint sentences (replication). • Plausibility effect (low constraint) smaller than expectancy effect (high constraint). • Lexicality effect (left anterior negativity) only present in low constraint sentences. • Pseudowords are scrutinized closely by the readers in the absence of expectations. Readers generate predictions about the meaning of upcoming words while reading constraining sentences. These predictions feed down to predictions about orthographic form. For example, orthographic neighbors of predicted words yield reduced N400 amplitudes compared to non-neighbors regardless of lexical status (Laszlo & Federmeier, 2009). We investigated whether readers are sensitive to lexicality in low constraint sentences when they must scrutinize the perceptual input more closely for word recognition. In a replication and extension of Laszlo and Federmeier (2009) , we observed similar patterns as the original study in high constraint sentences, but found a lexicality effect in low constraint sentences that was not present when the sentence was highly constraining. This suggests that, in the absence of strong expectations, readers adopt a different reading strategy to scrutinize the structure of words more in depth to make sense of what they have read compared to when they encounter a supportive sentence context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We tested the impact of a minimal fictional description in sentence comprehension. • This description was enough to trigger a perspective switch in online information processing. • This perspective switch was not enough to override real-world knowledge. • The N400s of fictional sentences and real-world sentences were indistinguishable. • Real-world sentences were always better recalled than fictional sentences. Inconsistent information can be hard to understand, but in cases like fiction readers can integrate it with little to no difficulties. The present study aimed at examining if perspective switching can take place when only a minimal fictional description is provided (fictional world condition), as compared with general world knowledge (real world condition). Participants read sentences where food items had animated or inanimate features while EEG was recorded and performed a sentence completion task to evaluate recall. In the real-world condition, the N400 was significantly larger for sentences incongruent, rather than congruent, with general world knowledge. In the fictional world condition, the N400 elicited by congruent and incongruent sentences did not differ, confirming that the minimal description impacted online information processing. Information consistent with general knowledge was better recalled in both conditions. The current results highlight how contextual information is integrated during sentence comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC) has been implicated in both integration and conflict resolution in sentence comprehension. Most evidence in favor of the integration account comes from processing ambiguous or anomalous sentences, which also poses a demand for conflict resolution. In two eye-tracking experiments we studied the role of VLPFC in integration when demands for conflict resolution were minimal. Two closely-matched groups of individuals with chronic post-stroke aphasia were tested: the Anterior group had damage to left VLPFC, whereas the Posterior group had left temporo-parietal damage. In Experiment 1 a semantic cue (e.g., "She will eat the apple") uniquely marked the target (apple) among three distractors that were incompatible with the verb. In Experiment 2 phonological cues (e.g., "She will see an eagle."/"She will see a bear.") uniquely marked the target among three distractors whose onsets were incompatible with the cue (e.g., all consonants when the target started with a vowel). In both experiments, control conditions had a similar format, but contained no semantic or phonological contextual information useful for target integration (e.g., the verb "see", and the determiner "the"). All individuals in the Anterior group were slower in using both types of contextual information to locate the target than were individuals in the Posterior group. These results suggest a role for VLPFC in integration beyond conflict resolution. We discuss a framework that accommodates both integration and conflict resolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many studies have provided evidence for the automaticity and immediacy with which stereotypical knowledge affects our behavior. However, less is known about how such social knowledge interacts with linguistic cues during comprehension. In this ERP sentence processing study we took advantage of the rich grammatical gender morphology of Spanish to explore the processing of role nouns in which stereotype and grammatical cues were simultaneously manipulated, in a factorial design. We show that stereotypical knowledge overrides syntactic cues, highlighting the immediacy with which stereotype knowledge is activated during language comprehension and supporting proposals claiming that social knowledge impacts on language processing differently from other forms of semantics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Resource limitation has often been invoked as a key driver of sentence comprehension difficulty, in both theories of language-unimpaired and language-impaired populations. In the field of aphasia, one such influential theory is Caplan's resource reduction hypothesis (RRH). In this large investigation of online processing in aphasia in German, we evaluated three key predictions of the RRH in 21 individuals with aphasia and 22 control pparticipants. Measures of online processing were obtained by combining a sentence-picture matching task with the visual world paradigm. Four sentence types were used to investigate the generality of the findings, and two test phases were used to investigate RRH's predictions regarding variability in aphasia. The processing patterns were consistent with two of the three predictions of the RRH. Overall, our investigation shows that the RRH can account for important aspects of sentence processing in aphasia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Comprehension of structurally complex embedded sentences is correlated with individual alpha power attenuation during task but not with alpha power at rest. • These effects were localized in left temporal-parietal brain regions known to be associated with language processing, and their right-hemisphere homologues. Alpha power attenuation during cognitive task performing has been suggested to reflect a process of release of inhibition, increase of excitability, and thereby benefit the improvement of performance. Here, we hypothesized that changes in individual alpha power during the execution of a complex language comprehension task may correlate with the individual performance in that task. We tested this using magnetoencephalography (MEG) recorded during comprehension of German sentences of different syntactic complexity. Results showed that neither the frequency nor the power of the spontaneous oscillatory activity at rest were associated with the individual performance. However, during the execution of a sentences processing task, the individual alpha power attenuation did correlate with individual language comprehension performance. Source reconstruction localized these effects in left temporal-parietal brain regions known to be associated with language processing and their right-hemisphere homologues. Our results support the notion that in-task attenuation of individual alpha power is related to the essential mechanisms of the underlying cognitive processes, rather than merely to general phenomena like attention or vigilance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research has shown that semantic processing of sentences engages more activity in the bilingual compared to the monolingual brain and, more specifically, in the inferior frontal gyrus. The present study aims to extend those results and examines whether semantic and also grammatical sentence processing involve different cerebral structures when testing in the native language. In this regard, highly proficient Spanish/Catalan bilinguals and Spanish monolinguals made grammatical and semantic judgments in Spanish while being scanned. Results showed that both types of judgments recruited more cerebral activity for bilinguals in language-related areas including the superior and middle temporal gyri. Such neural differences co-occurred with similar performance at the behavioral level. Taken together, these data suggest that early bilingualism shapes the brain and cognitive processes in sentence comprehension even in their native language; on the other hand, they indicate that brain over activation in bilinguals is not constrained to a specific area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comprehenders predict upcoming speech and text on the basis of linguistic input. How many predictions do comprehenders make for an upcoming word? If a listener strongly expects to hear the word “sock”, is the word “shirt” partially expected as well, is it actively inhibited, or is it ignored? The present research addressed these questions by measuring the “downstream” effects of prediction on the processing of subsequently presented stimuli using the cumulative semantic interference paradigm. In three experiments, subjects named pictures ( sock ) that were presented either in isolation or after strongly constraining sentence frames (“After doing his laundry, Mark always seemed to be missing one …”). Naming sock slowed the subsequent naming of the picture shirt – the standard cumulative semantic interference effect. However, although picture naming was much faster after sentence frames, the interference effect was not modulated by the context (bare vs. sentence) in which either picture was presented. According to the only model of cumulative semantic interference that can account for such a pattern of data, this indicates that comprehenders pre-activated and maintained the pre-activation of best sentence completions ( sock ) but did not maintain the pre-activation of less likely completions ( shirt ). Thus, comprehenders predicted only the most probable completion for each sentence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Syntactically and semantically anomalous words encountered during sentence comprehension are known to elicit dissociable electrophysiological responses, which are thought to reflect distinct aspects of language processing. However, the sources of these responses have not been well characterized. We used beamforming analysis of magnetoencephalography (MEG) data to map generators of electrophysiological responses to linguistic anomalies. Anomalous words occurred in the context of a sentence acceptability judgement task conducted in both visual and auditory modalities. Time–frequency analysis revealed that both kinds of violations elicited event-related synchronization (ERS) in the delta–theta frequency range (1–5 Hz), and desynchronization (ERD) in the alpha–beta range (8–30 Hz). In addition, these responses were differentially modulated by violation type and presentation modality. 1–5 Hz responses were consistently localized within medial prefrontal cortex and did not vary significantly across violation types, but were stronger for visual presentation. In contrast, 8–30 Hz ERD occurred in different regions for different violation types. For semantic violations the distribution was predominantly in the bilateral occipital cortex and left temporal and inferior frontal regions, and these effects did not differ for visual and auditory presentation. In contrast, syntactic responses were strongly affected by presentation modality. Under visual presentation, syntactic violations elicited bilateral 8–30 Hz ERD extending into dorsal parietal and frontal regions, whereas effects were much weaker and mostly statistically insignificant in the auditory modality. These results suggest that delta–theta ERS reflects generalized increases in working memory demands related to linguistic anomaly detection, while alpha–beta ERD reflects specific activation of cortical regions involved in distinct aspects of linguistic processing, such as semantic vs. phonological short-term memory. Beamforming analysis of time-domain average signals (ERFs) revealed an N400m effect for semantic anomalies in both modalities, localized to left superior temporal and posterior frontal regions, and a later P600-like effect for syntactic anomalies in both modalities, widespread over bilateral frontal, posterior temporal, and parietal regions. These results indicate that time-domain averaged responses and induced oscillatory responses have distinct properties, including localization and modality dependence, and likely reflect dissociable and complementary aspects of neural activity related to language comprehension and additional task-related processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reading times on words in a sentence depend on the amount of information the words convey, which can be estimated by probabilistic language models. We investigate whether event-related potentials (ERPs), too, are predicted by information measures. Three types of language models estimated four different information measures on each word of a sample of English sentences. Six different ERP deflections were extracted from the EEG signal of participants reading the same sentences. A comparison between the information measures and ERPs revealed a reliable correlation between N400 amplitude and word surprisal. Language models that make no use of syntactic structure fitted the data better than did a phrase-structure grammar, which did not account for unique variance in N400 amplitude. These findings suggest that different information measures quantify cognitively different processes and that readers do not make use of a sentence’s hierarchical structure for generating expectations about the upcoming word. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Event-related potential studies of grammatical gender agreement often report a left anterior negativity (LAN) when agreement violations occur. Some studies have shown that during sentence comprehension gender violations can also interact with semantic processing to modulate a negativity associated with processing meaning — the N400. Given that the LAN and N400 overlap in time, they are identified by their scalp distributions and purported functional roles. Critically, grammatical gender violations also elicit a right posterior positivity that can overlap temporally and potentially affect the scalp distribution of the LAN/N400. We measured the effect of grammatical gender violations in the LAN/N400 window and late positive component (LPC) during comprehension of Spanish sentences. A post-nominal adjective could either make sense or not, and either agree or disagree in gender with the preceding noun. We observed a negativity to gender agreement violations in the LAN/N400 window (300–500ms post stimulus onset) that was smaller than the semantic-congruity N400, but overlapped with it in time and distribution. The early portion of the LPC to gender violations was modulated by sentence constraint, occurring as early as 450ms in highly constraining sentences. A subadditive interaction occurred at the later portion of the LPC with equivalent effects for single and double violations (gender and semantics), reflecting a general stage of reprocessing. Overall, our data support models of language comprehension whereby both semantic and morphosyntactic information can affect processing at similar time points. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

• Animacy induces difficulty in phrase production and comprehension across ages. • The animacy effects vary with age and backward digit span (BDS) only in production. • BDS development interacts with phrase planning from late childhood to adolescence. • Language development varies with task difficulty calling for more general theories. Some animacy configurations elicit parallel semantic interference in adult production and comprehension; for example, phrases with similar animate nouns like the man that the girl is hugging are more difficult than phrases like the doll that the girl is hugging. Yet little is known about how this interference manifests in development, particularly, beyond early childhood. Because frontal brain maturation and cognitive control improvements are known to occur across late childhood and adolescence, we investigated (a) how animacy-induced difficulty in production and comprehension vary with age throughout this period and (b) whether control processes reflected in the backward digit span (BDS) test uniquely explained these differences besides other language measures. In separate tasks, participants (8- to 15-year-old children; N = 91) heard auditory descriptions of depicted characters, produced characters' descriptions, and completed BDS, vocabulary, and reading experience tests. Results indicated that, as in adults, animacy modulated performance in production and comprehension across all ages. The animacy modulation interacted with age in production but not in comprehension, suggesting age-related animacy differences in production but relatively stable differences in comprehension despite processing speed improvements. Importantly, these age-related production differences were also modulated by the BDS scores; only participants with higher BDS scores displayed age-related animacy differences. Together, these results indicate that comprehension and production develop at different rates and that the development of BDS performance interacts with age-dependent changes in sentence planning from late childhood to adolescence. More generally, the study highlights tasks' disparities to be explained by cognitive and developmental models of language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] This is the first report that provides electrophysiological evidence of syntactic priming in Chinese. [•] Priming effects were robust when the verb was repeated. [•] The P600 amplitude was reduced in repeated target sentences at the word de. [•] No significant effects were observed in target sentences with synonymous conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] The neural basis of interference resolution in sentence comprehension was examined. [•] Syntactic and semantic interference were observed, but with a different time course. [•] BA45 and the superior temporal gyrus were sensitive to both types of interference. [•] A region in BA47 responded specifically to semantic interference resolution. [•] These interference effects could not be due to differential working memory demands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] An event-related brain potential study on case and animacy processing in Spanish. [•] Incorrectly case-marked inanimate objects elicit P600 effect. [•] Incorrectly case-marked animate objects elicit N400 effect. [•] Consistent with animacy hierarchy in thematic interpretation. [•] Thematic interpretation difficulties elicited by unexpectedly animate objects. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Highlights: [•] Syntactic category plus semantic anomalies elicited an N400 followed by a P600. [•] Transitivity plus semantic anomalies elicited an N400. [•] Syntax is not a necessary prerequisite for semantic combinations in reading Chinese. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Recent evidence suggests that blindness enables visual circuits to contribute to language processing. We examined whether this dramatic functional plasticity has a sensitive period. BOLD fMRI signal was measured in congenitally blind, late blind (blindness onset 9-years-old or later) and sighted participants while they performed a sentence comprehension task. In a control condition, participants listened to backwards speech and made match/non-match to sample judgments. In both congenitally and late blind participants BOLD signal increased in bilateral foveal-pericalcarine cortex during response preparation, irrespective of whether the stimulus was a sentence or backwards speech. However, left occipital areas (pericalcarine, extrastriate, fusiform and lateral) responded more to sentences than backwards speech only in congenitally blind people. We conclude that age of blindness onset constrains the non-visual functions of occipital cortex: while plasticity is present in both congenitally and late blind individuals, recruitment of visual circuits for language depends on blindness during childhood. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Adults can incrementally combine information from speech with astonishing speed to anticipate future words. Concurrently, a growing body of work suggests that vocabulary ability is crucially related to lexical processing skills in children. However, little is known about this relationship with predictive sentence processing in children or adults. We explore this question by comparing the degree to which an upcoming sentential theme is anticipated by combining information from a prior agent and action. 48 children, aged of 3 to 10, and 48 college-aged adults’ eye-movements were recorded as they heard a sentence (e.g., The pirate hides the treasure) in which the object referred to one of four images that included an agent-related, action-related and unrelated distractor image. Pictures were rotated so that, across all versions of the study, each picture appeared in all conditions, yielding a completely balanced within-subjects design. Adults and children quickly made use of combinatory information available at the action to generate anticipatory looks to the target object. Speed of anticipatory fixations did not vary with age. When controlling for age, individuals with higher vocabularies were faster to look to the target than those with lower vocabulary scores. Together, these results support and extend current views of incremental processing in which adults and children make use of linguistic information to continuously update their mental representation of ongoing language. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: An event-related potential experiment was conducted to investigate the temporal neural dynamics of animacy processing in the interpretation of classifier–noun combinations. Participants read sentences that had a non-canonical structure, object noun + subject noun + verb + numeral-classifier + adjective. The object noun and its classifier were either (a) congruent, (b) incongruent, but matching in animacy, or (c) incongruent, mismatching in animacy. An N400 effect was observed for both incongruent conditions, but not for additional mismatch in animacy. When only data from participants who accepted the non-canonical structure were analyzed, the animacy mismatch elicited a P600 but still no N400. These findings suggest that animacy information is not used immediately for semantic integration of nouns and their classifiers, but is used in a later analysis reflected by P600. Thus, the temporal neural dynamics of animacy processing in sentence comprehension may be modulated by the relevance of animacy to thematic interpretation. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: We investigated the time-course of cortical activation during comprehension of literal and idiomatic sentences using MEG and anatomically guided distributed source analysis. Previous fMRI work had shown that the comprehension of sentences including action-related words elicits somatotopic semantic activation along the motor strip, reflecting meaning aspects of constituent words. Furthermore, idioms more strongly activated temporal pole and prefrontal cortex than literal sentences. Here we show that, compared to literal sentences, processing of idioms in a silent reading task modulates anterior fronto-temporal activity very early-on, already 150–250ms after the sentences'' critical disambiguating words (“kick the habit”). In parallel, the meaning of action words embedded in sentences is reflected by somatotopic activation of precentral motor systems. As neural reflections of constituent parts of idiomatic sentences are manifest at the same early latencies as brain indexes of idiomatic vs. literal meaning processing, we suggest that within ¼ of a second, compositional and abstract context-driven semantic processes in parallel contribute to the understanding of idiom meaning. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Functional neuroimaging studies of syntactic processing have been interpreted as identifying the neural locations of parsing and interpretive operations. However, current behavioral studies of sentence processing indicate that many operations occur simultaneously with parsing and interpretation. In this review, we point to issues that arise in discriminating the effects of these concurrent processes from those of the parser/interpreter in neural measures and to approaches that may help resolve them. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Recent ERP studies report that implausible verb-argument combinations can elicit a centro-parietal P600 effect (e.g., “The hearty meal was devouring …”; ). Such eliciting conditions do not involve outright syntactic anomaly, deviating from previous reports of P600. attributed such P600 effects to structural reprocessing that occurs when syntactic cues fail to support a semantically attractive interpretation (‘meal’ as the Agent of ‘devouring’) and the syntactic cues are overwhelmed; the sentence is therefore perceived as syntactically ill-formed. The current study replicated such findings and also found that altering the syntactic cues in such situations of syntax-semantics conflict (e.g., “The hearty meal would devour …”) affects the conflict’s outcome. P600s were eliminated when sentences contained syntactic cues that required multiple morphosyntactic steps to “repair”. These sentences elicited a broad, left-anterior negativity at 300–600ms (LAN). We interpret the reduction in P600 amplitude in terms of “resistance” of syntactic cues to reprocessing. We speculate that the LAN may be generated by difficulty retrieving an analysis that satisfies both syntactic and semantic cues, which results when syntactic cues are strong enough to resist opposing semantic cues. This pattern of effects is consistent with partially independent but highly interactive syntactic and semantic processing streams, which often operate collaboratively but can compete for influence over interpretation. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: When listening to speech in everyday-life situations, our cognitive system must often cope with signal instabilities such as sudden breaks, mispronunciations, interfering noises or reverberations potentially causing disruptions at the acoustic/phonetic interface and preventing efficient lexical access and semantic integration. The physiological mechanisms allowing listeners to react instantaneously to such fast and unexpected perturbations in order to maintain intelligibility of the delivered message are still partly unknown. The present electroencephalography (EEG) study aimed at investigating the cortical responses to real-time detection of a sudden acoustic/phonetic change occurring in connected speech and how these mechanisms interfere with semantic integration. Participants listened to sentences in which final words could contain signal reversals along the temporal dimension (time-reversed speech) of varying durations and could have either a low- or high-cloze probability within sentence context. Results revealed that early detection of the acoustic/phonetic change elicited a fronto-central negativity shortly after the onset of the manipulation that matched the spatio-temporal features of the Mismatch Negativity (MMN) recorded in the same participants during an oddball paradigm. Time reversal also affected late event-related potentials (ERPs) reflecting semantic expectancies (N400) differently when words were predictable or not from the sentence context. These findings are discussed in the context of brain signatures to transient acoustic/phonetic variations in speech. They contribute to a better understanding of natural speech comprehension as they show that acoustic/phonetic information and semantic knowledge strongly interact under adverse conditions. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The role of attentional control in lexical ambiguity resolution was examined in two patients with damage to the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) and one control patient with non-LIFG damage. Experiment 1 confirmed that the LIFG patients had attentional control deficits compared to normal controls while the non-LIFG patient was relatively unimpaired. Experiment 2 showed that all three patients did as well as normal controls in using biasing sentence context to resolve lexical ambiguities involving balanced ambiguous words, but only the LIFG patients took an abnormally long time on lexical ambiguities that resolved toward a subordinate meaning of biased ambiguous words. Taken together, the results suggest that attentional control plays an important role in the resolution of certain lexical ambiguities – those that induce strong interference from context-inappropriate meanings (i.e., dominant meanings of biased ambiguous words). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The purpose of this study was to explore changes in activation of the cortical network that serves auditory sentence comprehension in children in response to increasing demands of complex sentences. A further goal is to study how individual differences in children’s receptive language abilities are associated with such changes in cortical responses. Fourteen children, 10–16years old, participated in an event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment using a cross modal sentence-picture verification paradigm. We manipulated sentence difficulty and length in a 2×2 factorial design. Task-related activation covered large regions of the left and right superior temporal cortex, inferior parietal lobe, precuneous, cingulate, middle frontal gyrus and precentral gyrus. Sentence difficulty, independent of length, led to increased activation in the left temporal-parietal junction and right superior temporal gyrus. Changes in activation in frontal regions positively correlated with age-standardized receptive vocabulary scores and negatively correlated with reaction time on a receptive grammar test outside the scanner. Thus, individual differences in language skills were associated with changes in the network in response to changing task demands. These preliminary findings in a small sample of typically developing children suggest that the investigation of individual differences may prove useful in elucidating the underlying neural mechanisms of language disorders in children. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In an event-related potentials (ERPs) study, we examined the comprehension of different types of Chinese (Mandarin) relative clauses (object vs. subject-extracted) to test the universality and language specificity of sentence comprehension processes. Because Chinese lacks morphosyntactic cues to sentence constituent relations, it allows a test of the possibility that semantic-contextual processes dominate the extraction of clausal relations, in contrast to the structure-dependent processing in English and many other languages. ERP results at the RC embedded verbs showed a P600 effect for the subject-extraction type, reflecting a processing of phrasal reconfiguration, and an N400 effect for the object-extraction type, reflecting a processing of meaning reinterpretation. A central–frontal sustained negativity was produced by the RC head noun of object-extraction, suggesting a combined effect of meaning derivation and referents establishment. LORETA (Low Resolution Electrical Tomography) source localization showed activation of posterior dominance (e.g., BA 22/39/19/41/42) supporting the integration of structure mapping (P600) and meaning derivation (N400) in a developing sentential representation, consistent with the memory unification and control model (). More left-lateralized anterior regions of a frontal–temporal network (e.g., BA 47/38) became active later in the sentence (a sustained central–frontal negativity), when the thematic-role specification for multiple referents may have required additional cognitive and memory resources. Our findings suggest that Chinese sentence reading recruits a neural network that is sensitive to the sequential/hierarchical organization of linguistic inputs in a manner that resembles to the structure-dependent cognitive processes in other languages, reflecting a universal property of language processing. The ERP data shows that early lexical processes are important in the integration process, but also challenges the view that Chinese text reading depends primarily on semantic-contextual processing in the derivation of meaning representation. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This study investigates the neuro-cognitive mechanisms employed to monitor and resolve conflicts between competing sentential representations during sentence comprehension. Participants took part in a sentence comprehension task as well as the flanker and the color–word Stroop tasks while their brain activities were scanned with fMRI. Medial superior frontal gyrus (mSFG), left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), and left angular gyrus/inferior parietal lobule (AG/IPL) were more activated for implausible sentences, in which syntactic processes and semantic strategies give rise to incompatible sentential representations, as compared with plausible sentences, in which syntactic processes and semantic strategies point to coherent interpretations. Among them, dorsal mSFG, left IFG, and left IPL constantly responded to the plausibility in sentence comprehension and the congruency in the two perceptual tasks, while anterior mSFG and left AG were specifically sensitive to the sentence plausibility. These results suggest that the domain-general mechanisms of executive control are recruited to deal with conflicts between representations of linguistic inputs. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Using event-related functional MRI, we examined the involvement of the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) in semantic integration in reading Chinese sentences. During scanning, Chinese readers read individually presented sentences and judged whether or not a sentence was semantically acceptable. Behaviorally, those sentences with a small degree of semantic violation were found to be more difficult to reject relative to sentences with a large degree of semantic violation, indicating that more semantic integration occurred in the former than in the latter condition. Direct contrast revealed significantly greater brain activity in the LIFG for sentences with a small violation, relative to those with a large violation, but no differences in any anterior temporal cortical areas between the two types of anomalous sentences. The results are in line with the idea that the LIFG plays a critical role in integrating individual word meanings to coherent sentence-level messages, but not with the idea that semantic integration depends on anterior temporal cortex in language comprehension. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: One explanation for the inconsistencies in research examining the sentence comprehension abilities of the right hemisphere (RH) is the presence of confounding variables that have generally served to disadvantage the processing capacities of the RH. As such, the present study aimed to investigate hemispheric differences in the use of message-level sentential information by removing some of the factors known to be inherently disadvantageous for RH comprehension. Thirty-two right-handed undergraduate university students participated in a computer-based lexical decision task where RT and error rates were recorded. The sensitivity of each hemisphere to the message-level contextual information contained in short versus long sentences was compared, as well as the effect of stimulus modality (visual compared to auditory). The results showed that the RH benefited from increased levels of context to at least the same extent as the LH and that, more importantly, this could not be explained by word-level processes alone. This finding, unusual in behavioral research on normal individuals but consistent with neuropsychological, electrophysiological, and neuroimaging approaches, suggests that the RH plays an important role in sentence comprehension, at least in relation to sentences that conform to a relatively simple structure. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: A longstanding question in bilingualism is whether syntactic information is shared between the two language processing systems. We used an fMRI repetition suppression paradigm to investigate syntactic priming in reading comprehension in German–English late-acquisition bilinguals. In comparison to conventional subtraction analyses in bilingual experiments, repetition suppression has the advantage of being able to detect neuronal populations that are sensitive to properties that are shared by consecutive stimuli. In this study, we manipulated the syntactic structure between prime and target sentences. A sentence with a passive sentence structure in English was preceded either by a passive or by an active sentence in English or German. We looked for repetition suppression effects in left inferior frontal, left precentral and left middle temporal regions of interest. These regions were defined by a contrast of all non-target sentences in German and English versus the baseline of sentence-format consonant strings. We found decreases in activity (repetition suppression effects) in these regions of interest following the repetition of syntactic structure from the first to the second language and within the second language. Moreover, a separate behavioural experiment using a word-by-word reading paradigm similar to the fMRI experiment showed faster reading times for primed compared to unprimed English target sentences regardless of whether they were preceded by an English or a German sentence of the same structure. We conclude that there is interaction between the language processing systems and that at least some syntactic information is shared between a bilingual''s languages with similar syntactic structures. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: We present two ERP studies on the processing of word order variations in Japanese, a language that is suited to shedding further light on the implications of word order freedom for neurocognitive approaches to sentence comprehension. Experiment 1 used auditory presentation and revealed that initial accusative objects elicit increased processing costs in comparison to initial subjects (in the form of a transient negativity) only when followed by a prosodic boundary. A similar effect was observed using visual presentation in Experiment 2, however only for accusative but not for dative objects. These results support a relational account of word order processing, in which the costs of comprehending an object-initial word order are determined by the linearization properties of the initial object in relation to the linearization properties of possible upcoming arguments. In the absence of a prosodic boundary, the possibility for subject omission in Japanese renders it likely that the initial accusative is the only argument in the clause. Hence, no upcoming arguments are expected and no linearization problem can arise. A prosodic boundary or visual segmentation, by contrast, indicate an object-before-subject word order, thereby leading to a mismatch between argument “prominence” (e.g. in terms of thematic roles) and linear order. This mismatch is alleviated when the initial object is highly prominent itself (e.g. in the case of a dative, which can bear the higher-ranking thematic role in a two argument relation). We argue that the processing mechanism at work here can be distinguished from more general aspects of “dependency processing” in object-initial sentences. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The architecture of the language processing system for speakers of more than one language remains an intriguing topic of research. A common finding is that speakers of multiple languages are slower at responding to language stimuli in their non-native language (L2) than monolingual speakers. This may simply reflect participants’ unfamiliarity with words in the L2, however it may also be the reflection of interference from competing lexical alternatives both across and within the participants’ multiple languages. In the current studies (one behavioral, one electrophysiological) we investigate how interference from phonologically similar words within the L2 alone may account for problems in auditory language comprehension in non-native speakers. To this end a cross modal lexical priming (CMLP) paradigm was implemented, which allowed us to look for effects of spoken word primes embedded in sentences on the recognition of target stimuli. Specifically, we investigated whether a word such as mouse, which has a close phonological neighbor, house, would show a modulating effect on recognition of a word semantically related to house but not to mouse (i.e., roof). We hypothesized that L2 speakers, less efficient at categorizing phonemes in their L2 would show a difference in the processing of roof preceded by mouse as compared to roof preceded by another unrelated word, such as lamp, due to a residual co-activation of the phonological neighbor mouse. Furthermore, L1 speakers, highly proficient at recognizing phonemes in their native tongue, should show no such effect. The results of both studies clearly support our hypothesis, indicating that phonological neighbors in the L2 may greatly interfere with L2 word recognition. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to test competing claims about the role of executive resources during the disambiguation of a sentence featuring a temporary structural ambiguity. Written sentences with a direct object (DO) structure or a sentential complement (SC) structure were shown to 19 healthy, right-handed, young adults in a phrase-by-phrase manner. These sentences contained a main verb that is statistically more likely to be associated with a DO structure or an SC structure. Half of each type of sentence also contained an extra phrase strategically located to stress working memory prior to disambiguating the sentence. We found that sentences featuring a less consistent verb-structure mapping recruit greater dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) activation than sentences with a more consistent verb-structure mapping, implicating strategic on-line planning during resolution of a temporary structural ambiguity. By comparison, we observed left inferior parietal cortex (IPC) activation in sentences with an increased working memory demand compared to sentences with a low working memory load. These findings are consistent with a large-scale neural network for sentence processing that recruits distinct planning and working memory processing resources as needed to support the comprehension of sentences. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: An unresolved issue in the study of sentence comprehension is whether the process of gap-filling is mediated by the construction of empty categories (traces), or whether the parser relates fillers directly to the associated verb’s argument structure. We conducted an event-related potentials (ERP) study that used the violation paradigm to examine the time course and spatial distribution of brain responses to ungrammatically filled gaps. The results indicate that the earliest brain response to the violation is an early left anterior negativity (eLAN). This ERP indexes an early phase of pure syntactic structure building, temporally preceding ERPs that reflect semantic integration and argument structure satisfaction. The finding is interpreted as evidence that gap-filling is mediated by structurally predicted empty categories, rather than directly by argument structure operations. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Two divided visual field priming experiments examined cerebral asymmetries for understanding metaphors varying in sentence constraint. Experiment 1 investigated ambiguous words (e.g., SWEET and BRIGHT) with literal and metaphoric meanings in ambiguous and unambiguous sentence contexts, while Experiment 2 involved standard metaphors (e.g., The drink you gave me was a meteor) with sententially consistent and inconsistent targets (i.e., POTENT vs COMET). Similar literal and metaphor priming effects were found in both visual fields across most experimental conditions. However, RH processes also maintained activation of sententially inconsistent literal meanings following metaphoric expressions. These results do not strongly support the RH as the preferred substrate for metaphor comprehension (e.g., ), and suggest that processes in both hemispheres can support metaphor comprehension, although not via identical mechanisms. The LH may utilize sentence constraint to select and integrate only contextually relevant literal and metaphoric meanings, whereas the RH may be less sensitive to sentence context and can maintain the activation of some alternative interpretations. This may be potentially useful in situations where an initial understanding must be revised. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The question of whether the bilingual brain processes a first and second language (L1 and L2, respectively) differently is a central issue in many psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic studies. This study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate whether late bilinguals process structurally complex sentences in L1 and L2 in different cortical networks. For this purpose, we directly compared brain activity during the processing of active and passive sentences in both L1 and L2. We asked 36 healthy subjects to judge whether or not a presented sentence was semantically plausible. Both L1 and L2 activated the left hemispheric language-related regions such as the left inferior frontal, superior/middle temporal, and parietal cortices. However, we found different activation patterns between L1 and L2 in the processing of passive sentences. Passive sentences elicited greater activation than their active counterparts in the left pars triangularis, the premotor area, and the superior parietal lobule in Japanese, but not in English. Furthermore, there was a significant interaction between sentence type (active versus passive) and language (Japanese versus English) in the left pars orbitalis. The results of this study indicate that late bilinguals use similar cortical regions to comprehend both L1 and L2. However, when late bilinguals are presented with structurally complex sentences, the involvement of these regions differs between L1 and L2. These results suggest that, in addition to age of L2 acquisition and L2 proficiency, differences in grammatical construction affect cortical representation during the comprehension of L1 and L2. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: We reanalyzed the data in , considering individual patients’ responses to different sentence types to be non-independent events. The analyses revealed effects of two of the three factors identified by Drai and Grodzinsky—constituent movement and passive mood. The result is inconsistent with the trace deletion hypothesis; we conclude that features of syntactic structure other than constituent movement are relevant to understanding performance variation in patients with Broca’s aphasia. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

An on-line "word detection" paradigm was used to assess the comprehension of thematic and transitive verb agreements during sentence processing in individuals diagnosed with probable Alzheimer's Disease (AD, n = 15) and Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD, n = 14). AD, FTD, and control participants (n = 17) were asked to listen for a word in a sentence. Unbeknownst to the participants, the target word followed an agreement involving a verb's transitivity or thematic role component. Control participants took significantly longer to respond to a target word only when it immediately followed a violation of a thematic role agreement or a transitivity agreement, relative to target word detection immediately following the corresponding correct agreement. AD patients were selectively insensitive to thematic role agreement violations, although they demonstrated a normal processing pattern for transitivity agreements. This is consistent with previous observations showing selective difficulty with the thematic role component of a verb in AD. FTD patients were insensitive to violations of thematic role and transitivity agreements. FTD patients' impairment for both transitivity and thematic role agreements may reflect a broader degradation of verb knowledge that involves both grammatical and semantic representations, or difficulty processing sentence structure that also causes a thematic role deficit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sentence comprehension is a complex task that involves both language-specific processing components and general cognitive resources. Comprehension can be made more difficult by increasing the syntactic complexity or the presentation rate of a sentence, but it is unclear whether the same neural mechanism underlies both of these effects. In the current study, we used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to monitor neural activity while participants heard sentences containing a subject- relative or object-relative center-embedded clause presented at three different speech rates. Syntactically complex object-relative sentences activated left inferior frontal cortex across presentation rates, whereas sentences presented at a rapid rate recruited frontal brain regions such as anterior cingulate and premotor cortex, regardless of syntactic complexity. These results suggest that dissociable components of a large-scale neural network support the processing of syntactic complexity and speech presented at a rapid rate during auditory sentence processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current study examines how patients with aphasia access the meanings of idioms during spoken sentence comprehension. In our experiment, we had 4 subjects whose native language is German: 2 left-hemisphere damaged patients (Wernicke’s and global aphasia); 1 right-hemisphere damaged patient; and 1 age-matched healthy speaker. Ambiguous two-element German noun compounds carrying an idiomatic as well as a literal meaning served as target words. While listening to contextually biasing sentences containing the target words, the subjects performed a lexical decision task at the offset of each compound. All the subjects, including the aphasic patients, accessed the compounds’ literal and idiomatic meanings simultaneously despite the existence of contextually biasing sentences. The data are discussed by taking account of the findings of recent studies of lexical semantic processing in aphasia. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The relation between working memory (WM) limitation and sentence comprehension was assessed in Hebrew-speaking aphasics, three conduction aphasics and three agrammatics. The study compared sentences that required different types of reactivation—syntactic-semantic reactivation, in relative clauses, and word form/phonological reactivation, in sentences with reanalysis of lexical ambiguity. The effect of phonological memory load, manipulated by number of words intervening between the activation and the reactivation, on comprehension of the two sentence types was examined. The findings were that agrammatic aphasics failed in the comprehension of object relatives but not on subject relatives irrespective of their antecedent–gap distance. Conduction aphasics, on the other hand, who showed severe WM limitation, comprehended well all types of relative clauses and were unaffected by antecedent–gap distance. The conduction aphasics failed to understand the sentences that required phonological reactivation when the phonological distance was long. These results suggest that the type of reactivation required by the sentence, as well as the type of memory overload are crucial in determining the effect of WM limitation on sentence comprehension. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The study examined how grammatical agreement affects reading in Finnish. Readers’ eye fixation patterns were recorded when they read one of three alternative versions of the same sentences, where the critical difference was the type of preceding word of the target nouns. The preceding word was (a) an agreeing modifier (mainioksi orkesteriksi=‘for an excellent orchestra’), (b) a non-agreeing modifier that was grammatical, unambiguous and synonymous to the agreeing modifier (kelpo orkesteriksi=‘for an excellent orchestra’), or (c) a baseline condition without a modifier (orkesteriksi=‘for an orchestra’). Two different types of agreement were used, a modifier-head agreement and a possessive agreement. The results showed that the agreeing modifiers facilitate and the non-agreeing modifiers inhibit the reading of the target nouns compared to the neutral baseline condition. These effects appeared in the second-pass reading. The pattern was similar between the two agreement structures. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This study used fMRI to investigate the neural basis of the tongue-twister effect in a sentence comprehension task. Participants silently read sentences equated for the syntactic structure and the lexical frequency of the constituent words, but differing in the proportion of words that shared similar initial phonemes. The manipulation affected not only the reading times and comprehension performance, but also the amount of activation seen in a number of language-related cortical areas. The effect was not restricted to cortical areas known to be involved in articulatory speech programming or rehearsal processes (the inferior frontal gyrus and anterior insula), but also extended to areas associated with other aspects of language processing (inferior parietal cortex) associated with phonological processing and storage. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]