Left inferior frontal lesions impair syntactic predictions at the sensory level
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1
MPI for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Germany
Recent event-related EEG and MEG studies have shown that the detection of syntactic errors in spoken and written language coincides with sensory processes in the 100 ms range both temporally (e.g. Hasting & Kotz, 2008) and spatially (e.g. Herrmann et al., 2009). It has further been shown that sensory cortices are indeed sensitive to certain syntactic cues (Dikker et al., 2009). The present study aims to clarify whether such early sensory syntactic processing is based on syntactic rule representations within the sensory cortices, or whether it reflects rapid mismatch responses that are enabled by top-down syntactic predictions at the sensory level. The left inferior frontal cortex has frequently been found to serve syntactic functions (e.g. Friederici & Kotz, 2003) and is therefore a prime candidate region for the generation of syntactic predictions. We tested 10 patients with left inferior frontal lesions but intact temporal cortices in a passive auditory event-related potential (ERP) paradigm that had reliably elicited early grammaticality effects in the past (Hasting & Kotz, 2008). Neither word category violations nor subject-verb agreement violations elicited early grammaticality effects in these patients, whereas a group of 10 age-matched controls showed reliable negativities in response to both violation types (150 - 250 ms and 100 - 300 ms, respectively). These results show that intact auditory cortices and surrounding temporal regions do not suffice to generate early syntax-specific ERP effects. They rather suggest that early sensory aspects of syntactic analysis critically depend on top-down predictions generated by the left-inferior frontal cortex.
Keywords:
EEG,
Language
Conference:
XI International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON XI), Palma, Mallorca, Spain, 25 Sep - 29 Sep, 2011.
Presentation Type:
Poster Presentation
Topic:
Poster Sessions: Neural Bases of Language
Citation:
Hasting
AS,
Jakuszeit
M and
Kotz
SA
(2011). Left inferior frontal lesions impair syntactic predictions at the sensory level.
Conference Abstract:
XI International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON XI).
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2011.207.00510
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Received:
22 Nov 2011;
Published Online:
28 Nov 2011.
*
Correspondence:
Dr. Anna S Hasting, MPI for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany, hasting@cbs.mpg.de