文章基本信息

标题：Neural Mechanisms Underlying the Processing of Complex Sentences: An fMRI Study
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作者：Margreet Vogelzang ; Christiane M. Thiel ; Stephanie Rosemann 等
期刊名称：Neurobiology of Language
电子版ISSN：2641-4368
出版年度：2020
卷号：1
期号：2
页码：226-248
DOI：10.1162/nol_a_00011
语种：English
出版社：The MIT Press
摘要：AbstractPrevious research has shown effects of syntactic complexity on sentence processing. In linguistics, syntactic complexity (caused by different word orders) is traditionally explained by distinct linguistic operations. This study investigates whether different complex word orders indeed result in distinct patterns of neural activity, as would be expected when distinct linguistic operations are applied. Twenty-two older adults performed an auditory sentence processing paradigm in German with and without increased cognitive load. The results show that without increased cognitive load, complex sentences show distinct activation patterns compared with less complex, canonical sentences: complex object-initial sentences show increased activity in the left inferior frontal and temporal regions, whereas complex adjunct-initial sentences show increased activity in occipital and right superior frontal regions. Increased cognitive load seems to affect the processing of different sentence structures differently, increasing neural activity for canonical sentences, but leaving complex sentences relatively unaffected. We discuss these results in the context of the idea that linguistic operations required for processing sentence structures with higher levels of complexity involve distinct brain operations.