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Perturbation of left posterior prefrontal cortex modulates top-down processing in sentence comprehension
Lars Meyer1, Anne Elsner1, Sabrina Turker1
1Department of Neuropsychology, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany.
Neuroimage
|July 29, 2018
Summary
Language comprehension relies on top-down processing. Disrupting the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) impaired the ability to chunk words into phrases, confirming its role in language processing.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Psycholinguistics
- Cognitive Science
Background:
- Language comprehension involves inferential processes and top-down efforts.
- Ambiguous sentences require syntactic chunking, influenced by working memory capacity.
- The left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) is hypothesized to support short phrase chunking.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the causal role of the left IFG in syntactic phrase chunking during language comprehension.
- To determine if the left IFG is essential for processing ambiguous sentences requiring top-down interpretation.
Main Methods:
- Used ambiguous sentences to probe syntactic phrase chunking.
- Employed repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to temporarily disrupt left IFG activity.
- Assessed the impact of rTMS on participants' ability to tolerate long syntactic phrases.
Main Results:
- Perturbing the left IFG significantly reduced the tolerance for long phrases.
- This disruption indicated an inability to effectively chunk words into phrases.
- Auditory information processing remained unaffected by the left IFG perturbation.
Conclusions:
- The left IFG plays a causal, top-down role in chunking words into syntactic phrases.
- Findings challenge the notion that the left IFG is solely responsible for processing auditory information.
- The study provides evidence for the left IFG's critical function in resolving syntactic ambiguity.
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