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Examining Online Syntactic Processing of Spoken Complex Sentences in Chinese Using Dual-Modal Interference Tasks
Published on: September 5, 2019
Broca's area plays a role in syntactic processing during Chinese reading comprehension
Suiping Wang1, Zude Zhu, John X Zhang
1Department of Psychology, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, China.
Neuropsychologia
|February 8, 2008
Summary
This study used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (ER-fMRI) to investigate brain activity during Chinese syntactic processing. Findings suggest the left inferior frontal gyrus (BA44) plays a key role in processing syntax across different writing systems.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Cognitive Science
- Linguistics
Background:
- Syntactic processing is crucial for language comprehension.
- Understanding the neural basis of syntactic processing in logographic languages like Chinese is important for cross-linguistic comparisons.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate brain activation patterns associated with syntactic processing in Chinese readers using ER-fMRI.
- To identify brain regions involved in distinguishing syntactic violations.
Main Methods:
- Event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (ER-fMRI) was employed.
- 15 native Chinese speakers performed semantic congruency judgments on three sentence types: Congruous (CON), Semantic violation (SEM), and Semantic+Syntactic violation (SEM+SYN).
- Brain activity was measured by percent signal change in identified regions.
Main Results:
- Three brain regions showed significant differences in activation: BA44 (left inferior frontal gyrus) and BA9, BA10/46 (left middle frontal gyrus).
- The left BA44 exhibited significantly stronger activation in the SEM+SYN condition compared to SEM or CON conditions.
- Activation levels in SEM and CON conditions were similar, highlighting BA44's role in syntactic processing.
Conclusions:
- The left inferior frontal gyrus (BA44) is critically involved in syntactic processing of logographic Chinese.
- Neural substrates for syntactic processing appear to be shared across distinct writing systems, including logographic Chinese and alphabetic English.
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