Differences in grammatical processing strategies for active and passive sentences: An fMRI study

Feng, Shuang; Legault, Jennifer; Lei, Yang; Zhu, Jun-Wei; Shao, Keqing; Yang, Yujiu

doi:10.1016/j.jneuroling.2014.09.002

Cited by 22 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 69 publications

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“…When reading passive sentences, this initial thematic role assignment is incorrect and has to be revised. This reanalysis process has been proposed as an explanation for greater left IFG activation for passive sentences (Feng et al, 2015;Mack, Meltzer-Asscher, Barbieri, & Thompson, 2013). In our study, we observed decoding in a posterior portion of left IFG (pars opericularis; BA44), which may reflect these processes of reanalysis.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 64%

Stimulus-independent neural coding of event semantics: Evidence from cross-sentence fMRI decoding

Asyraff

Lemarchand

Tamm

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Multivariate neuroimaging studies indicate that the brain represents word and object concepts in a format that readily generalises across stimuli. Here we investigated whether this was true for neural representations of events described using sentences. Participants viewed sentences describing four events in different ways. Multivariate classifiers were trained to discriminate the four events using a subset of sentences, allowing us to test generalisation to novel sentences. We found that neural patterns in a left-lateralised network of frontal, temporal and parietal regions discriminated events in a way that generalised successfully over changes in the syntactic and lexical properties of the sentences used to describe them. In contrast, decoding in visual areas was sentence-specific and failed to generalise to novel sentences. In the reverse analysis, we tested for decoding of syntactic and lexical form, independent of the event being described. Regions displaying this coding were limited and largely fell outside the canonical semantic network. Our results indicate that a distributed neural network represents the meaning of event sentences in a way that is robust to changes in their structure and form. They suggest that the semantic system disregards the surface properties of stimuli in order to represent their underlying conceptual significance.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 64%

Stimulus-independent neural coding of event semantics: Evidence from cross-sentence fMRI decoding

Asyraff

Lemarchand

Tamm

et al. 2020

Preprint

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“…This interpretation is further supported by an Italian study that demonstrated improved accuracy on the comprehension of passive sentences after transcranial magnetic stimulation in the left posterior parietal cortex (Finocchiaro et al, 2015). NP-movement was also associated with the left pars triangularis of the IFG for both Japanese (Yokoyama et al, 2006; Hirotani et al, 2011) and Chinese passives (Ye and Zhou, 2009), and the left pars orbitalis of the IFG in Chinese passives (Feng et al, 2015). In contrast, a few studies comparing passives to actives reported activation only in non-traditional language areas such as the left frontal operculum, caudal to the IFG (Yokoyama et al, 2007), and the postcentral gyrus (Matchin and Hickok, 2016).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These results are in line with several Japanese and Chinese NP-movement studies that also compared passive and active structures. However, it should be noted that unlike Japanese and English passives which are marked by an additional morpheme in the verb, the Chinese language has no morphological inflections (Yokoyama et al, 2007; Feng et al, 2015). Temporoparietal activity was reported in the left posterior superior temporal gyrus (STGp) (Kinno et al, 2008; Hirotani et al, 2011) for Japanese and Chinese passives, and the left superior parietal lobule (Yokoyama et al, 2006) and left inferior parietal lobule (IPL) (Yokoyama et al, 2007) for Japanese passives only–areas which have all been previously implicated in thematic re-analysis and verb-argument integration (Thompson and Meltzer-Asscher, 2014).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neural Connectivity in Syntactic Movement Processing

Europa

Gitelman

Kıran

et al. 2019

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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Linguistic theory suggests non-canonical sentences subvert the dominant agent-verb-theme order in English via displacement of sentence constituents to argument (NP-movement) or non-argument positions (wh-movement). Both processes have been associated with the left inferior frontal gyrus and posterior superior temporal gyrus, but differences in neural activity and connectivity between movement types have not been investigated. In the current study, functional magnetic resonance imaging data were acquired from 21 adult participants during an auditory sentence-picture verification task using passive and active sentences contrasted to isolate NP-movement, and object- and subject-cleft sentences contrasted to isolate wh-movement. Then, functional magnetic resonance imaging data from regions common to both movement types were entered into a dynamic causal modeling analysis to examine effective connectivity for wh-movement and NP-movement. Results showed greater left inferior frontal gyrus activation for Wh > NP-movement , but no activation for NP > Wh-movement . Both types of movement elicited activity in the opercular part of the left inferior frontal gyrus, left posterior superior temporal gyrus, and left medial superior frontal gyrus. The dynamic causal modeling analyses indicated that neither movement type significantly modulated the connection from the left inferior frontal gyrus to the left posterior superior temporal gyrus, nor vice-versa, suggesting no connectivity differences between wh- and NP-movement. These findings support the idea that increased complexity of wh-structures, compared to sentences with NP-movement, requires greater engagement of cognitive resources via increased neural activity in the left inferior frontal gyrus, but both movement types engage similar neural networks.

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“…Because left IFG revealed stronger activation for processing complex syntax even in a non-word detection task, the authors claimed task-independent involvement of this region in syntactic processing. Similarly, an FMRI study in Chinese also reported stronger activation in left IFG and posterior superior temporal gyrus for processing passive sentences compared to active sentences [ 51 ]. Because passive sentences are assumed by generative-transformational theories to be more complex than active sentences [ 52 ], the authors associated left IFG with syntactic movement processing in Chinese as in other Indo-European languages.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Neural correlates of processing sentences and compound words in Chinese

et al. 2017

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Sentence reading involves multiple linguistic operations including processing of lexical and compositional semantics, and determining structural and grammatical relationships among words. Previous studies on Indo-European languages have associated left anterior temporal lobe (aTL) and left interior frontal gyrus (IFG) with reading sentences compared to reading unstructured word lists. To examine whether these brain regions are also involved in reading a typologically distinct language with limited morphosyntax and lack of agreement between sentential arguments, an FMRI study was conducted to compare passive reading of Chinese sentences, unstructured word lists and disconnected character lists that are created by only changing the order of an identical set of characters. Similar to previous findings from other languages, stronger activation was found in mainly left-lateralized anterior temporal regions (including aTL) for reading sentences compared to unstructured word and character lists. On the other hand, stronger activation was identified in left posterior temporal sulcus for reading unstructured words compared to unstructured characters. Furthermore, reading unstructured word lists compared to sentences evoked stronger activation in left IFG and left inferior parietal lobule. Consistent with the literature on Indo-European languages, the present results suggest that left anterior temporal regions subserve sentence-level integration, while left IFG supports restoration of sentence structure. In addition, left posterior temporal sulcus is associated with morphological compounding. Taken together, reading Chinese sentences engages a common network as reading other languages, with particular reliance on integration of semantic constituents.

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Differences in grammatical processing strategies for active and passive sentences: An fMRI study

Cited by 22 publications

References 69 publications

Stimulus-independent neural coding of event semantics: Evidence from cross-sentence fMRI decoding

Stimulus-independent neural coding of event semantics: Evidence from cross-sentence fMRI decoding

Neural Connectivity in Syntactic Movement Processing

Neural correlates of processing sentences and compound words in Chinese

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