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Eye Tracking During Visually Situated Language Comprehension: Flexibility and Limitations in Uncovering Visual Context Effects
Published on: November 30, 2018
BA 44 in Broca's area supports syntactic gender decisions in language production
Stefan Heim1, Simon B Eickhoff, Bertram Opitz
1Research Centre Jülich, Institute of Medicine, AG Brain Mapping, Jülich, Germany. s.heim@fz-juelich.de
Abstract:
The involvement of Broca's area in syntactic gender processing has been shown for metalinguistic decisions in language comprehension and for natural speech production. These studies, however, are not directly comparable owing to the different methods used. The present functional magnetic resonance imaging study investigated gender processing during language production with metalinguistic decisions instead of natural production. Participants saw pictures of real objects and made gender decisions (GEN) about the picture names. Activation was compared with nonlinguistic decisions about geometrical objects (BASE). Broca's area was activated in the contrast GEN > BASE. Using cytoarchitectonic probability maps, the activation was localized at Brodmann's area 44. The data suggest that Brodmann's area 44 in Broca's area is a shared neural correlate for gender processing in production and comprehension.
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