Comparison of baseline conditions to investigate syntactic production using functional magnetic resonance imaging

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in humans has revealed increases in brain activity associated with various mental activities that are task-dependent. However, changes in brain activity have been dependent on baseline as well as experimental tasks. In the present study, fMRI was applied to investigate the most appropriate baseline task, picture naming or passive viewing of nonsense objects, to isolate syntactic processes related to 14.7-s blocks of silent sentence generation in 10 neurologically normal adults. The aim of this comparison was to determine the most suitable baseline task for the purpose of elucidating changes in the neural substrates of sentence generation following therapy for syntax production problems. Use of naming but not passive object viewing as a baseline task obscured activity in Broca's area, a region previously shown to be involved in syntactic processing. These results suggest that passive viewing of nonsense objects serves as a more appropriate baseline comparison than object naming for investigating sentence processing.