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Parametric effects of syntactic-semantic conflict in Broca's area during sentence processing
Malathi Thothathiri1, Albert Kim, John C Trueswell
1University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, United States. mthotha1@swarthmore.edu
None:
The hypothesized role of Broca's area in sentence processing ranges from domain-general executive function to domain-specific computation that is specific to certain syntactic structures. We examined this issue by manipulating syntactic structure and conflict between syntactic and semantic cues in a sentence processing task. Functional neuroimaging revealed that activation within several Broca's area regions of interest reflected the parametric variation in syntactic-semantic conflict. These results suggest that Broca's area supports sentence processing by mediating between multiple incompatible constraints on sentence interpretation, consistent with this area's well-known role in conflict resolution in other linguistic and non-linguistic tasks.
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