Effects of tasks on BOLD signal responses to sentence contrasts: Review and commentary

Abstract

Functional neuroimaging studies of syntactic processing have been interpreted as identifying the neural locations of parsing and interpretive operations. However, current behavioral studies of sentence processing indicate that many operations occur simultaneously with parsing and interpretation. In this review, we point to issues that arise in discriminating the effects of these concurrent processes from those of the parser/interpreter in neural measures and to approaches that may help resolve them.

Figure 1

Model of operations involved in performing plausibility judgment task

Figure 2

BOLD signal activity in left inferior frontal and left middle temporal areas as a function of syntactic structure and semantic constraint in plausibility judgment (from Caplan et al., 2008b).

Figure 3

BOLD signal activity related to sentence type contrast in early and late TR periods in verification (from Caplan et al., 2008a).

Figure 4

Granger causality during a 200 msec interval in trials that produce a Ganong effect. Red arrow indicates influence of supramarginal gyrus on superior temporal gyrus (from Gow et al., 2008)

Figure 5

Granger influences on bilateral superior temporal sulcus for trials in which assimilation does not produce competition (A) and trials on which it does produce competition (B) (from Gow and Segawa, 2009)