scholarly journals The Neural Basis of Reversible Sentence Comprehension: Evidence from Voxel-based Lesion Symptom Mapping in Aphasia

2012 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 212-222 ◽  
Author(s):  
Malathi Thothathiri ◽  
Daniel Y. Kimberg ◽  
Myrna F. Schwartz
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Parietal Cortex ◽  
Sentence Comprehension ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Broca's Area ◽  
Neural Basis ◽  
Phonological Working Memory ◽  
Large Group ◽  
Complex Sentences ◽  
Lesion Symptom Mapping

We explored the neural basis of reversible sentence comprehension in a large group of aphasic patients (n = 79). Voxel-based lesion symptom mapping revealed a significant association between damage in temporo-parietal cortex and impaired sentence comprehension. This association remained after we controlled for phonological working memory. We hypothesize that this region plays an important role in the thematic or what–where processing of sentences. In contrast, we detected weak or no association between reversible sentence comprehension and the ventrolateral pFC, which includes Broca's area, even for syntactically complex sentences. This casts doubt on theories that presuppose a critical role for this region in syntactic computations.

scholarly journals Prefrontal and Parietal Attractor Networks Mediate Working Memory Judgments

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sihai Li ◽  
Christos Constantinidis ◽  
Xue-Lian Qi
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Prefrontal Cortex ◽  
Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Memory Task ◽  
Delayed Response ◽  
Persistent Activity ◽  
Neural Basis ◽  
Brain Areas ◽  
Dorsolateral Prefrontal

ABSTRACTThe dorsolateral prefrontal cortex plays a critical role in spatial working memory and its activity predicts behavioral responses in delayed response tasks. Here we addressed whether this predictive ability extends to categorical judgments based on information retained in working memory, and is present in other brain areas. We trained monkeys in a novel, Match-Stay, Nonmatch-Go task, which required them to observe two stimuli presented in sequence with an intervening delay period between them. If the two stimuli were different, the monkeys had to saccade to the location of the second stimulus; if they were the same, they held fixation. Neurophysiological recordings were performed in areas 8a and 46 of the dlPFC and 7a and lateral intraparietal cortex (LIP) of the PPC. We hypothesized that random drifts causing the peak activity of the network to move away from the first stimulus location and towards the location of the second stimulus would result in categorical errors. Indeed, for both areas, when the first stimulus appeared in a neuron’s preferred location, the neuron showed significantly higher firing rates in correct than in error trials. When the first stimulus appeared at a nonpreferred location and the second stimulus at a preferred, activity in error trials was higher than in correct. The results indicate that the activity of both dlPFC and PPC neurons is predictive of categorical judgments of information maintained in working memory, and the magnitude of neuronal firing rate deviations is revealing of the contents of working memory as it determines performance.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENTThe neural basis of working memory and the areas mediating this function is a topic of controversy. Persistent activity in the prefrontal cortex has traditionally been thought to be the neural correlate of working memory, however recent studies have proposed alternative mechanisms and brain areas. Here we show that persistent activity in both the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and posterior parietal cortex predicts behavior in a working memory task that requires a categorical judgement. Our results offer support to the idea that a network of neurons in both areas act as an attractor network that maintains information in working memory, which informs behavior.

scholarly journals Co-localization of Stroop and Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution in Broca's Area: Implications for the Neural Basis of Sentence Processing

2009 ◽  
Vol 21 (12) ◽  
pp. 2434-2444 ◽  
Author(s):  
David January ◽  
John C. Trueswell ◽  
Sharon L. Thompson-Schill
Keyword(s):  
Prefrontal Cortex ◽  
Cognitive Control ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Sentence Processing ◽  
Sentence Comprehension ◽  
Syntactic Ambiguity ◽  
Broca’S Area ◽  
Broca's Area ◽  
Neural Basis ◽  
Control Processes

For over a century, a link between left prefrontal cortex and language processing has been accepted, yet the precise characterization of this link remains elusive. Recent advances in both the study of sentence processing and the neuroscientific study of frontal lobe function suggest an intriguing possibility: The demands to resolve competition between incompatible characterizations of a linguistic stimulus may recruit top–down cognitive control processes mediated by prefrontal cortex. We use functional magnetic resonance imaging to test the hypothesis that individuals use shared prefrontal neural circuitry during two very different tasks—color identification under Stroop conflict and sentence comprehension under conditions of syntactic ambiguity—both of which putatively rely on cognitive control processes. We report the first demonstration of within-subject overlap in neural responses to syntactic and nonsyntactic conflict. These findings serve to clarify the role of Broca's area in, and the neural and psychological organization of, the language processing system.

scholarly journals The neurobiology of agrammatic sentence comprehension: a lesion study

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Corianne Rogalsky ◽  
Arianna N. LaCroix ◽  
Kuan-Hua Chen ◽  
Steven W. Anderson ◽  
Hanna Damasio ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Temporal Lobe ◽  
Sentence Processing ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Sentence Comprehension ◽  
Functional Neuroimaging ◽  
Matching Task ◽  
Broca’S Area ◽  
Broca's Area ◽  
Cognitive Demands ◽  
Lesion Symptom Mapping

AbstractBroca’s area has long been implicated in sentence comprehension. Damage to this region is thought to be the central source of “agrammatic comprehension” in which performance is substantially worse (and near chance) on sentences with noncanonical word orders compared to canonical word order sentences (in English). This claim is supported by functional neuroimaging studies demonstrating greater activation in Broca’s area for noncanonical versus canonical sentences. However, functional neuroimaging studies also have frequently implicated the anterior temporal lobe (ATL) in sentence processing more broadly, and recent lesion-symptom mapping studies have implicated the ATL and mid temporal regions in agrammatic comprehension. The present study investigates these seemingly conflicting findings in 66 left hemisphere patients with chronic focal cerebral damage. Patients completed two sentence comprehension measures, sentence-picture matching and plausibility judgments. Patients with damage including Broca’s area (but excluding the temporal lobe; n=11) on average did not exhibit the expected agrammatic comprehension pattern, e.g. their performance was > 80% on noncanonical sentences in the sentence-picture matching task. Patients with ATL damage (n=18) also did not exhibit an agrammatic comprehension pattern. Across our entire patient sample, the lesions of patients with agrammatic comprehension patterns in either task had maximal overlap in posterior superior temporal and inferior parietal regions. Using voxel-based lesion symptom mapping (VLSM), we find that lower performances on canonical and noncanonical sentences in each task are both associated with damage to a large left superior temporal-inferior parietal network including portions of the ATL, but not Broca’s area. Notably however, response bias in plausibility judgments was significantly associated with damage to inferior frontal cortex, including gray and white matter in Broca’s area, suggesting that the contribution of Broca’s area to sentence comprehension may be related to task-related cognitive demands.

scholarly journals Neural Correlates of Syntactic Ambiguity in Sentence Comprehension for Low and High Span Readers

2004 ◽  
Vol 16 (9) ◽  
pp. 1562-1575 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian J. Fiebach ◽  
Sandra H. Vos ◽  
Angela D. Friederici
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Sentence Processing ◽  
Sentence Comprehension ◽  
Memory Span ◽  
Working Memory Capacity ◽  
Memory Capacity ◽  
Syntactic Ambiguity ◽  
Neural Basis ◽  
Processing Demands ◽  
Superior Portion

Syntactically ambiguous sentences have been found to be difficult to process, in particular, for individuals with low working memory capacity. The current study used fMRI to investigate the neural basis of this effect in the processing of written sentences. Participants with high and low working memory capacity read sentences with either a short or long region of temporary syntactic ambiguity while being scanned. A distributed left-dominant network in the peri-sylvian region was identified to support sentence processing in the critical region of the sentence. Within this network, only the superior portion of Broca's area (BA 44) and a parietal region showed an activation increase as a function of the length of the syntactically ambiguous region in the sentence. Furthermore, it was only the BA 44 region that exhibited an interaction of working memory span, length of the syntactic ambiguity, and sentence complexity. In this area, the activation increase for syntactically more complex sentences became only significant under longer regions of ambiguity, and for low span readers only. This finding suggests that neural activity in BA 44 increases during sentence comprehension when processing demands increase, be it due to syntactic processing demands or by an interaction with the individually available working memory capacity.

scholarly journals White Matter Brain Structure Predicts Language Performance and Learning Success

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stella M. Sanchez ◽  
Helmut Schmidt ◽  
Guillermo Gallardo ◽  
Alfred Anwander ◽  
Jens Brauer ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Individual Differences ◽  
White Matter ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Brain Structure ◽  
Network Motif ◽  
Language Performance ◽  
Neural Basis ◽  
Complex Sentences ◽  
The Individual

Individual differences in the ability to deal with language have long been discussed. The neural basis of these, however, is yet unknown. Here we investigated the relationship between long-range white matter connectivity of the brain, as revealed by diffusion tractography, and the ability to process syntactically complex sentences in the participants' native language as well as the improvement thereof by multi-day training. We identified specific network motifs that indeed related white matter tractography to individual language processing performance. First, for two such motifs, one in the left and one in the right hemisphere, their individual prevalence significantly predicted the individual language performance suggesting a predisposition for the individual ability to process syntactically complex sentences, which manifests itself in the white matter brain structure. Both motifs comprise a number of cortical regions, but seem to be dominated by areas known for the involvement in working memory rather than the classical language network itself. Second, we identified another left hemispheric network motif, whose change of prevalence over the training period significantly correlated with the individual change in performance, thus reflecting training induced white matter plasticity. This motif comprises diverse cortical areas including regions known for their involvement in language processing, working memory and motor functions. The present findings suggest that individual differences in language processing and learning can be explained, in part, by individual differences in the brain's white matter structure. Brain structure may be a crucial factor to be considered when discussing variations in human cognitive performance, more generally.

scholarly journals Working Memory Capacities Neurally Dissociate: Evidence from Acute Stroke

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Randi C Martin ◽  
Junhua Ding ◽  
A Cris Hamilton ◽  
Tatiana T Schnur
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Functional Neuroimaging ◽  
Acute Stage ◽  
Angular Gyrus ◽  
Neural Basis ◽  
Word Level ◽  
Lesion Symptom Mapping ◽  
Behavioral Evidence ◽  
Subcortical Regions ◽  
Brain Reorganization

Abstract Substantial behavioral evidence implies the existence of separable working memory (WM) components for maintaining phonological and semantic information. In contrast, only a few studies have addressed the neural basis of phonological vs. semantic WM using functional neuroimaging and none has used a lesion-symptom mapping (LSM) approach. Here we address this gap, reporting a multivariate LSM study of phonological and semantic WM for 94 individuals at the acute stage of left hemisphere stroke. Testing at the acute stage avoids issues of brain reorganization and the adoption of patient strategies for task performance. The LSM analyses for each WM component controlled for the other WM component and semantic and phonological knowledge at the single word level. For phonological WM, the regions uncovered included the supramarginal gyrus, argued to be the site of phonological storage, and several cortical and subcortical regions plausibly related to inner rehearsal. For semantic WM, inferior frontal regions and the angular gyrus were uncovered. The findings thus provide converging evidence for separable systems for phonological and semantic WM that are distinguished from the systems supporting long-term knowledge representations in those domains.

scholarly journals Parsing-error-Hindi

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samar Husain
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Sentence Comprehension ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
The Face ◽  
Case Markers ◽  
Effective Use ◽  
Verbal Relations ◽  
Memory Constraints

The role of prediction during sentence comprehension is widely acknowledged to be very critical in SOV languages. Robust clause-fi?nal verbal prediction and its maintenance have been invoked to explain eff?ects such as anti-locality and lack of structural forgetting. At the same time, there is evidence that these languages avoid increased preverbal phrase complexity due to working-memory constraints. Given the critical role of prediction in processing of SOV languages, in this work, we study verbal predictions in Hindi (an SOV language) to investigate its robustness and fallibility using a series of completion studies. Analyses of verbal completions based on grammaticality (grammatical vs ungrammatical) as well as their syntactic property (in terms of verb class) show, as expected, frequent grammatical completions based on effective use of preverbal nouns and case-markers. However, there were also high instances of ungrammatical completions. In particular, consistent errors were made in conditions with 3 animate nouns with unique/similar case-markers. These errors increased in the face of adjuncts of di?ffering complexity following the preverbal nouns. The grammatical and ungrammatical completions show that native speakers of Hindi posit structures with at most 2 verbal heads and 5 core verbal relations, thus highlighting an upper bound to verbal prediction and its maintenance in such con?figurations. A rating study con?firmed that certain errors found in completion tasks can lead to grammatical illusions. Further, a detailed analysis of the completion errors in such cases revealed that the parser ignores the complete preverbal nominal features of the input and instead selectively reconstructs the input based on their frequency in the language to form illicit parses at the expense of globally consistent parses. Together, the results show that while preverbal cues are eff?ectively employed by the parser to make clause ?final structural predictions, the parsing system breaks down when the number of predicted verbs/relations exceeds beyond a certain threshold. In effect, the results suggests that processing in SOV languages is susceptible to center-embeddings similar to that in SVO languages. This highlights the over-arching influence of working-memory constraints during sentence comprehension and thereby on the parser to posit less complex structures.

Children's Verbal Working Memory: Role of Processing Complexity in Predicting Spoken Sentence Comprehension

2012 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 669-682 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beula M. Magimairaj ◽  
James W. Montgomery
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Sentence Comprehension ◽  
Memory Task ◽  
Verbal Working Memory ◽  
Attentional Focus ◽  
Word Recall ◽  
Complex Sentences ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Simple Sentences

Purpose This study investigated the role of processing complexity of verbal working memory tasks in predicting spoken sentence comprehension in typically developing children. Of interest was whether simple and more complex working memory tasks have similar or different power in predicting sentence comprehension. Method Sixty-five children (6- to 12-year-olds) completed a verbal working memory (listening) span task that varied in syntactic processing difficulty (simple sentences representing a “simple working memory task,” complex sentences representing a “complex working memory task”) and a standardized sentence comprehension test. Results Word recall on the simple and complex working memory tasks correlated with each other. Both memory tasks also correlated with children's sentence comprehension. Regression analyses showed that the simple working memory task remained a significant predictor of comprehension even after accounting for variance associated with age and performance on the complex working memory task. Conclusions Results were interpreted to suggest that relative to more complex verbal working memory tasks, simple tasks are more robust predictors of children's sentence comprehension because they represent a basic yet robust index of working memory that sufficiently captures controlled attentional focus.

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