Syntactic Computation in the Human Brain: The Degree of Merger as a Key Factor

PLoS ONE

Volumn 8, Issue 2, 2013, Pages

  Ohta, Shinri ^a,b   Fukui, Naoki ^c,d   Sakai, Kuniyoshi L ^a,d  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TOKYO   (Japan)

^b JAPAN SOCIETY FOR THE PROMOTION OF SCIENCE   (Japan)

^c SOPHIA UNIVERSITY   (Japan)

^d JAPAN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY AGENCY   (Japan)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ADULT; ANTERIOR CINGULATE; ARCUATE FASCICULUS; ARTICLE; BRAIN FUNCTION; CEREBELLUM; CONTROLLED STUDY; DEGREE OF MERGER; DIFFUSION TENSOR IMAGING; FRONTAL GYRUS; FUNCTIONAL MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAGING; GRAMMAR; HUMAN; HUMAN EXPERIMENT; INSULA; LANGUAGE; LINGUISTICS; MALE; MEMORY; NEUROIMAGING; NORMAL HUMAN; PARS OPERCULARIS; PARS TRIANGULARIS; PREMOTOR CORTEX; RIGHT HANDEDNESS; STATISTICAL ANALYSIS; SUPRAMARGINAL GYRUS; TASK PERFORMANCE; VISUAL STIMULATION;

ADULT; BRAIN; BRAIN MAPPING; HUMANS; LANGUAGE; LIKELIHOOD FUNCTIONS; LINGUISTICS; MALE; MODELS, NEUROLOGICAL; NERVE NET; PHOTIC STIMULATION; REACTION TIME; YOUNG ADULT;

EID: 84874271872     PISSN: None     EISSN: 19326203     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0056230     Document Type: Article

References (53)

1. Hopcroft JE, Ullman JD (1979) Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. 418 p.
2. O'Grady W, Archibald J, Aronoff M, Rees-Miller J (2010) Contemporary Linguistics: An Introduction, 6th Edition. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin's. 694 p.
3. Röder B, Stock O, Neville H, Bien S, Rösler F, (2002) Brain activation modulated by the comprehension of normal and pseudo-word sentences of different processing demands: A functional magnetic resonance imaging study. Neuroimage 15: 1003-1014.
4. Pallier C, Devauchelle A-D, Dehaene S, (2011) Cortical representation of the constituent structure of sentences. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 108: 2522-2527.
5. Chomsky N (1957) Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton Publishers. 117 p.
6. Chomsky N (1965) Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 251 p.
7. Chomsky N (1995) The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 420 p.
8. Fukui N, Sakai H, (2003) The visibility guideline for functional categories: Verb raising in Japanese and related issues. Lingua 113: 321-375.
9. Fukui N (2011) Merge and Bare Phrase Structure. In: Boeckx C, editor. The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Minimalism. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. 73-95.
10. Saito M, Fukui N, (1998) Order in phrase structure and movement. Ling Inq 29: 439-474.
11. Chomsky N (2004) Beyond Explanatory Adequacy. In: Belletti A, editor. Structures and Beyond: The Cartography of Syntactic Structures, Volume 3. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. 104-131.
12. Stromswold K, Caplan D, Alpert N, Rauch S, (1996) Localization of syntactic comprehension by positron emission tomography. Brain Lang 52: 452-473.
13. Dapretto M, Bookheimer SY, (1999) Form and content: Dissociating syntax and semantics in sentence comprehension. Neuron 24: 427-432.
14. Embick D, Marantz A, Miyashita Y, O'Neil W, Sakai KL, (2000) A syntactic specialization for Broca's area. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 97: 6150-6154.
15. Hashimoto R, Sakai KL, (2002) Specialization in the left prefrontal cortex for sentence comprehension. Neuron 35: 589-597.
16. Friederici AD, Rüschemeyer S-A, Hahne A, Fiebach CJ, (2003) The role of left inferior frontal and superior temporal cortex in sentence comprehension: Localizing syntactic and semantic processes. Cereb Cortex 13: 170-177.
17. Suzuki K, Sakai KL, (2003) An event-related fMRI study of explicit syntactic processing of normal/anomalous sentences in contrast to implicit syntactic processing. Cereb Cortex 13: 517-526.
18. Musso M, Moro A, Glauche V, Rijntjes M, Reichenbach J, et al. (2003) Broca's area and the language instinct. Nat Neurosci 6: 774-781.
19. Kinno R, Kawamura M, Shioda S, Sakai KL, (2008) Neural correlates of noncanonical syntactic processing revealed by a picture-sentence matching task. Hum Brain Mapp 29: 1015-1027.
20. Sakai KL, (2005) Language acquisition and brain development. Science 310: 815-819.
21. Lee H, Devlin JT, Shakeshaft C, Stewart LH, Brennan A, et al. (2007) Anatomical traces of vocabulary acquisition in the adolescent brain. J Neurosci 27: 1184-1189.
22. Pattamadilok C, Knierim IN, Duncan KJK, Devlin JT, (2010) How does learning to read affect speech perception? J Neurosci 30: 8435-8444.
23. Friston KJ, Henson RN, (2006) Commentary on: Divide and conquer; A defence of functional localisers. Neuroimage 30: 1097-1099.
24. Friston KJ, Harrison L, Penny W, (2003) Dynamic causal modelling. Neuroimage 19: 1273-1302.
25. Saur D, Kreher BW, Schnell S, Kümmerer D, Kellmeyer P, et al. (2008) Ventral and dorsal pathways for language. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 105: 18035-18040.
26. Wong FCK, Chandrasekaran B, Garibaldi K, Wong PCM, (2011) White matter anisotropy in the ventral language pathway predicts sound-to-word learning success. J Neurosci 31: 8780-8785.
27. Wilson SM, Galantucci S, Tartaglia MC, Rising K, Patterson DK, et al. (2011) Syntactic processing depends on dorsal language tracts. Neuron 72: 397-403.
28. Griffiths JD, Marslen-Wilson WD, Stamatakis EA, Tyler LK, (2013) Functional organization of the neural language system: Dorsal and ventral pathways are critical for syntax. Cereb Cortex 23: 139-147.
29. Oldfield RC, (1971) The assessment and analysis of handedness: The Edinburgh inventory. Neuropsychologia 9: 97-113.
30. Tsujimura N (2007) An Introduction to Japanese Linguistics, 2nd Edition. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. 501 p.
31. Kriegeskorte N, Simmons WK, Bellgowan PSF, Baker CI, (2009) Circular analysis in systems neuroscience: The dangers of double dipping. Nat Neurosci 12: 535-540.
32. Gentner TQ, Fenn KM, Margoliash D, Nusbaum HC, (2006) Recursive syntactic pattern learning by songbirds. Nature 440: 1204-1207.
33. Corballis MC, (2007) Recursion, language, and starlings. Cogn Sci 31: 697-704.
34. Abe K, Watanabe D, (2011) Songbirds possess the spontaneous ability to discriminate syntactic rules. Nat Neurosci 14: 1067-1074.
35. Beckers GJL, Bolhuis JJ, Okanoya K, Berwick RC, (2012) Birdsong neurolinguistics: Songbird context-free grammar claim is premature. NeuroReport 23: 139-145.
36. Bahlmann J, Schubotz RI, Friederici AD, (2008) Hierarchical artificial grammar processing engages Broca's area. Neuroimage 42: 525-534.
37. Bahlmann J, Rodriguez-Fornells A, Rotte M, Münte TF, (2007) An fMRI study of canonical and noncanonical word order in German. Hum Brain Mapp 28: 940-949.
38. Santi A, Grodzinsky Y, (2010) fMRI adaptation dissociates syntactic complexity dimensions. Neuroimage 51: 1285-1293.
39. Petersson KM, Forkstam C, Ingvar M, (2004) Artificial syntactic violations activate Broca's region. Cogn Sci 28: 383-407.
40. Friederici AD, Makuuchi M, Bahlmann J, (2009) The role of the posterior superior temporal cortex in sentence comprehension. NeuroReport 20: 563-568.
41. Gunji T (1987) Japanese Phrase Structure Grammar: A Unification-Based Approach. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company. 239 p.
42. Ivana A, Sakai H, (2007) Honorification and light verbs in Japanese. J East Asian Ling 16: 171-191.
43. Momo K, Sakai H, Sakai KL, (2008) Syntax in a native language still continues to develop in adults: Honorification judgment in Japanese. Brain Lang 107: 81-89.
44. den Ouden D-B, Saur D, Mader W, Schelter B, Lukic S, et al. (2012) Network modulation during complex syntactic processing. Neuroimage 59: 815-823.
45. Homae F, Yahata N, Sakai KL, (2003) Selective enhancement of functional connectivity in the left prefrontal cortex during sentence processing. Neuroimage 20: 578-586.
46. Tatsuno Y, Sakai KL, (2005) Language-related activations in the left prefrontal regions are differentially modulated by age, proficiency, and task demands. J Neurosci 25: 1637-1644.
47. Indefrey P, Hagoort P, Herzog H, Seitz RJ, Brown CM, (2001) Syntactic processing in left prefrontal cortex is independent of lexical meaning. Neuroimage 14: 546-555.
48. Botvinick MM, Cohen JD, Carter CS, (2004) Conflict monitoring and anterior cingulate cortex: An update. Trends Cogn Sci 8: 539-546.
49. Iijima K, Fukui N, Sakai KL, (2009) The cortical dynamics in building syntactic structures of sentences: An MEG study in a minimal-pair paradigm. Neuroimage 44: 1387-1396.
50. Chikazoe J, Konishi S, Asari T, Jimura K, Miyashita Y, (2007) Activation of right inferior frontal gyrus during response inhibition across response modalities. J Cogn Neurosci 19: 69-80.
51. Yngve VH, (1960) A model and an hypothesis for language structure. Proc Am Philos Soc 104: 444-466.
52. Gibson E (2000) The Dependency Locality Theory: A Distance-Based Theory of Linguistic Complexity. In: Marantz A, Miyashita Y, O'Neil W, editors. Image, Language, Brain: Papers from the First Mind Articulation Project Symposium. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 95-126.
53. Lewis R, Nakayama M (2002) Syntactic and positional similarity effects in the processing of Japanese embeddings. In: Nakayama M, editor. Sentence Processing in East Asian Languages. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. 85-111.