Could grammatical encoding and grammatical decoding be subserved by the same processing module?

Abstract

Advances in neuroimaging technology have increased our knowledge of the neuroanatomy of higher functions of the central nervous system: It is now possible to get a glimpse of the brain while it is in action. However, this progress would not have been possible without improved understanding of the knowledge base and operations that underlie complex behavior. Parallel to the greater precision of the technology, some progress has been made in our understanding of the cognitive architecture that underlies certain behavioral domains. In the study of brain-language relations, theoretical developments in linguistics have gone hand in hand with imaging, making a joint contribution to behavioral neurology. After several decades of the study of language and the brain from a linguistic angle, there is now a relatively dense body of facts that can be seriously evaluated. This target article will review central results and use them to motivate some novel conclusions about the representation of language in the human cerebral cortex. The discussion will revolve around the choice of unit of behavioral analysis and its theoretical import. An outlook on language derived from current linguistic theory can lead to a new and more precise picture of language and the brain.The old Connectionist school -led by Broca, Wernicke, and Lichtheim (see Lichtheim 1885, for a comprehensive exposition) and revived in our time by the late Norman Geschwind (e.g., 1970;1979) -fortified belief in the existence of cerebral language centers. As clinicians, these authors mostly emphasized the patients' communicative skills, viewing language as a collection of activities, practiced in the service of communication: speaking, listening, reading, writ- Abstract: A new view of the functional role of the left anterior cortex in language use is proposed. The experimental record indicates that most human linguistic abilities are not localized in this region. In particular, most of syntax (long thought to be there) is not located in Broca's area and its vicinity (operculum, insula, and subjacent white matter). This cerebral region, implicated in Broca's aphasia, does have a role in syntactic processing, but a highly specific one: It is the neural home to receptive mechanisms involved in the computation of the relation between transformationally moved phrasal constituents and their extraction sites (in line with the Trace-Deletion Hypothesis). It is also involved in the construction of higher parts of the syntactic tree in speech production. By contrast, basic combinatorial capacities necessary for language processing -for example, structure-building operations, lexical insertion -are not supported by the neural tissue of this cerebral region, nor is lexical or combinatorial semantics. The dense body of empirical evidence supporting this restrictive view comes mainly from several angles on lesion studies of syntax in agrammatic Broca's aphasia. Five empirical arguments are presented: experiments in sentence comprehension, cross-linguistic considerations (where a...

Priming prepositional-phrase attachment during comprehension.

“…When a particular structure is processed, during either production or comprehension, the rule associated with it is activated and is thereby facilitated for subsequent reuse in either production or comprehension (Branigan, Pickering, Liversedge, Stewart, & Urbach, 1995). This account accords with theories of language production, in which syntactic and semantic information are generally assumed to be common to production and comprehension (e.g., Levelt, Roelofs, & Meyer, 1999), and with approaches that assume a unified architecture for production and comprehension (e.g., Kempen, 2000).…”

Neural networks for sentence comprehension and production: An ALE‐based meta‐analysis of neuroimaging studies

“…An important question for the neurocognitive basis of sentence processing is whether (and to what extent) the brain structures that subserve syntactic decoding for sentence comprehension are shared in common with the brain structures engaged in the encoding processes underlying sentence production. Multiple lines of evidence are consistent with at least partially overlapping systems across domains (Grodzinsky, 2000;Kempen, 2000;Menenti et al, 2011;Pickering & Garrod, 2013;Segaert, Menenti, Weber, Petersson, & Hagoort, 2012;Silbert, Honey, Simony, Poeppel, & Hasson, 2014). For example, neuroimaging studies suggest common areas of activation, particularly in left IFG, left middle temporal gyrus (MTG), and bilateral SMA (Indefrey, Hellwig, Herzog, Seitz, & Hagoort, 2004;Menenti et al, 2011;Segaert et al, 2012;Silbert et al, 2014).…”

Grammatical workspace sharing during language production and language comprehension: Evidence from grammatical multitasking

“…This buffer can be occupied by the output of the word recognition mechanism during language comprehension, and by the output of the morpho-phonological encoding process during language production. directional difference (see Kempen, 2000, for a list of similarities). Hence, grammatical encoding and decoding could be accomplished by SHARED processing resources*by a single exemplar of all, or all important, parts of the cognitive resources.…”