Ambiguity in the brain: what brain imaging reveals about the processing of syntactically ambiguous sentences

Abstract

Two fMRI studies investigated the time course and amplitude of brain activity in language-related areas during the processing of syntactically ambiguous sentences. In Experiment 1, higher levels of activation were found during the reading of unpreferred syntactic structures as well as more complex structures. In Experiments 2A and 2B higher levels of brain activation were found for ambiguous sentences compared with unambiguous sentences matched for syntactic complexity, even when the ambiguities were resolved in favor of the preferred syntactic construction (despite the absence of this difference in previous reading time results). Although results can be reconciled with either serial or parallel models of sentence parsing, they arguably fit better into the parallel framework. Serial models can admittedly be made consistent but only by including a parallel component. The fMRI data indicate the involvement of a parallel component in syntactic parsing that might be either a selection mechanism or a construction of multiple parses.