Functional neuroimaging studies of syntactic processing

This paper reviews studies of the functional neuroanatomy of syntactic processing using positron emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), focusing on interpretability of studies and the model of functional neuroanatomy that emerges from existing work. It is argued that existing studies suggest a specialization for one aspect of syntactic processing in the left inferior frontal cortex in proficient language users, with variability in this localization across the entire population.