PET studies of syntactic processing with auditory sentence presentation

Sixteen subjects made plausibility judgments regarding auditorily presented cleft object and cleft subject sentences (It was the actress that the award thrilled; It was the award that thrilled the actress). rCBF increased in Broca's area, pars triangularis, when subjects processed the syntactically more complex cleft object sentences. The results are consistent with previous experiments using written materials and suggest that an increase in rCBF in Broca's area is associated with processing syntactically more complex sentences.