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The neurology of syntax: language use without Broca's area
1Department of Psychology, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel. yosef1@ccsg.tau.ac.il
The Behavioral and Brain Sciences
|April 17, 2001
Summary
Broca's area is not the primary center for most language functions, including syntax. It specifically processes transformations in syntax, not basic language building blocks.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Linguistics
- Cognitive Science
Background:
- The left anterior cortex, particularly Broca's area, has traditionally been considered a central hub for language processing.
- Previous research often localized broad syntactic abilities to this region, influencing understanding of language and the brain.
Purpose of the Study:
- To propose a revised view of the functional role of the left anterior cortex in language use.
- To differentiate the specific syntactic computations localized in Broca's area from general language abilities.
Main Methods:
- Analysis of lesion studies in agrammatic Broca's aphasia.
- Review of sentence comprehension experiments, cross-linguistic aphasia data, grammaticality judgments, and real-time processing studies.
- Inclusion of functional neuroimaging and speech production observations.
Main Results:
- Most syntactic functions are not localized in Broca's area; basic combinatorial language capacities and semantics are supported elsewhere.
- Broca's area is specifically involved in processing the relationship between moved constituents and their extraction sites (Trace-Deletion Hypothesis) and higher syntactic tree construction.
- Syntactic abilities are exclusively located in the left hemisphere but are distinct from other combinatorial and intellectual skills.
Conclusions:
- Language is a distinct, modular neurological entity primarily lateralized to the left hemisphere.
- Broca's area's role in syntax is specific to transformational computations, not general syntactic structure-building or lexical-semantic processing.