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Lexical and sentential processing in British Sign Language.

Mairéad MacSweeney1, Ruth Campbell, Bencie Woll

  • 1BBSU, Institute of Child Health, University College London, London, United Kingdom. m.macsweeney@ich.ucl.ac.uk

Human Brain Mapping
|June 21, 2005
PubMed
Summary
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Brain imaging reveals that processing signed sentences, like spoken language, activates specific left-hemisphere regions. These areas in the temporal and frontal cortex are crucial for sentence comprehension, regardless of language modality.

Area of Science:

  • Neuroscience
  • Linguistics
  • Cognitive Science

Background:

  • Spoken and written language processing primarily engages the left temporal and frontal cortex.
  • Previous research indicates these brain regions are sensitive to sentence structure versus word lists.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate if gestural language, specifically British Sign Language (BSL), recruits similar neural pathways for sentence processing as spoken or written language.
  • To determine if the left perisylvian regions are modality-general for sentence comprehension.

Main Methods:

  • Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to measure brain activity in Deaf and hearing native BSL signers.
  • Participants performed semantic anomaly detection in BSL sentences and nonsense sign detection in sign lists.

Related Experiment Videos

  • A contrast between hearing native signers and hearing sign-naïve individuals was also conducted.

    • Main Results:

    • Processing BSL sentences, compared to sign lists, showed greater activation in the left posterior temporal gyri and left inferior frontal cortex.
    • The anterior temporal cortex showed similar activation for both sentences and lists.
    • Hearing native signers, unlike sign-naïve participants, showed increased recruitment of left posterior temporal and inferior frontal regions for BSL sentence processing.

    Conclusions:

    • The left posterior temporal and inferior frontal regions are critical for processing the linguistic structure of sentences, irrespective of whether the input is spoken, written, or signed.
    • These findings suggest a modality-general role for these left perisylvian areas in sentence comprehension.