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Updated: Oct 5, 2026

A Semantic Priming Event-related Potential (ERP) Task to Study Lexico-semantic and Visuo-semantic Processing in Autism Spectrum Disorder
Published on: April 12, 2018
Syntactic processing in left prefrontal cortex is independent of lexical meaning
P Indefrey1, P Hagoort, H Herzog
1Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, NL-6500 AH Nijmegen, The Netherlands. indefrey@mpi.nl
Abstract:
In language comprehension a syntactic representation is built up even when the input is semantically uninterpretable. We report data on brain activation during syntactic processing, from an experiment on the detection of grammatical errors in meaningless sentences. The experimental paradigm was such that the syntactic processing was distinguished from other cognitive and linguistic functions. The data reveal that in syntactic error detection an area of the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, adjacent to Broca's area, is specifically involved in the syntactic processing aspects, whereas other prefrontal areas subserve general error detection processes.
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