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		An Event-Related fMRI Study of Syntactic Processing Evan Chen1, David Caplan1,2, Gloria Waters3, W. Caroline West2 1Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences & Technology 2Massachusetts General Hospital, 3Boston University
		Event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to investigate the localization of syntactic processing in sentence comprehension. Previous neuroimaging studies of syntactic processing have shown different activation patterns involving the inferior parietal lobe and Wernicke's area while Broca's area is consistently activated. Caplan et al (2001) sought to explain the differing activation patterns and, based on an examination of the literature, proposed that activity in Broca's area may represent sentence-level syntactic processing while activity in the inferior parietal lobe may represent the effects of task-related short-term memory demands in addition to sentence-level syntactic processing. We replicated the experiment of Stromswold et al (1996) and presented participants with syntactically more complex Subject-Object (SO) and syntactically less complex Object-Subject (OS) structures while they performed a relatively simple plausibility judgment task. The event-related fMRI design helped us to determine if the differences reported in the literature could be the result of low-level effects of imaging technique or stimulus type and to study processing of the syntactic structures in more detail, including an examination of the time course of the hemodynamic response. Significant activation was found in both the inferior frontal and inferior parietal lobes, bilaterally, for SO relative to OS structures. The hemodynamic response time course revealed that the BOLD response relative to the pre-sentential baseline similar in all regions of interest. Because the inferior parietal region was still activated even with a task with relatively low memory demands, the data do not support the proposal of Caplan et al (2001). However, it is not yet strong evidence for a claim that the regions of interest all perform exactly the same processes.
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(last modified 3/12/03)