When sex meets syntactic gender on a neural basis during pronoun processing

Hammer, Anke; Goebel, Rainer; Schwarzbach, Jens; Münte, Thomas F.; Jansma, Bernadette M.

doi:10.1016/j.brainres.2006.06.110

Cited by 30 publications

(49 citation statements)

References 70 publications

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“…Referential failure and sentence-external anaphoric inferences Also consistent with our predictions, referentially failing pronouns elicited increased BOLD responses in medial and bilateral parietal, and left middle frontal brain regions (e.g., Hammer et al, 2007;Kuperberg et al, 2003;Newman et al, 2001;Ni et al, 2000), supporting the notion that readers initially ascribed referential failure to a problem with the morpho-syntactic gender of the pronoun (e.g., Osterhout and Mobley, 1995;Van Berkum et al, 2007).…”

Section: Referential Ambiguity and Medial Prefrontal Regionssupporting

confidence: 85%

“…Although the present results indeed closely resemble those reported by Kuperberg et al (2003), our exact findings do not support the latter interpretation, because it seems unlikely that referentially problematic pronouns in the present study actually required less attentional resources than coherent pronouns. Furthermore, we also observed that superior regions of the left middle frontal cortex (BA 6/8) showed distinctive activation increases following referential failure (see also Hammer et al, 2007).…”

Section: Referential Ambiguity and Medial Prefrontal Regionssupporting

confidence: 57%

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On sense and reference: Examining the functional neuroanatomy of referential processing

2007

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In an event-related fMRI study, we examined the cortical networks involved in establishing reference during language comprehension. We compared BOLD responses to sentences containing referentially ambiguous pronouns (e.g., "Ronald told Frank that he…"), referentially failing pronouns (e.g., "Rose told Emily that he…") or coherent pronouns. Referential ambiguity selectively recruited medial prefrontal regions, suggesting that readers engaged in problemsolving to select a unique referent from the discourse model. Referential failure elicited activation increases in brain regions associated with morpho-syntactic processing, and, for those readers who took failing pronouns to refer to unmentioned entities, additional regions associated with elaborative inferencing were observed. The networks activated by these two referential problems did not overlap with the network activated by a standard semantic anomaly. Instead, we observed a double dissociation, in that the systems activated by semantic anomaly are deactivated by referential ambiguity, and vice versa. This inverse coupling may reflect the dynamic recruitment of semantic and episodic processing to resolve semantically or referentially problematic situations. More generally, our findings suggest that neurocognitive accounts of language comprehension need to address not just how we parse a sentence and combine individual word meanings, but also how we determine who's who and what's what during language comprehension.

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Section: Referential Ambiguity and Medial Prefrontal Regionssupporting

confidence: 85%

Section: Referential Ambiguity and Medial Prefrontal Regionssupporting

confidence: 57%

On sense and reference: Examining the functional neuroanatomy of referential processing

2007

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“…Notably, previous literature on German gender agreement in anaphoric reference reported increased activation in the Angular Gyrus (BA 39) for incongruent biological gender matching (Hammer et al, 2007). One interpretation of the result, therefore, is that the ACT-R model predicts processing effort when the antecedent is not salient or when there are equally salient competitors.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 80%

“…Previous neuroimgaing results on pronoun resolution have implicated the bilateral Inferior Frontal Gyrus (IFG), the left Medial Frontal Gyrus (MFG) and the bilateral Supramarginal/Angular Gyrus in gender mismatch between pronoun and antecedent (Hammer et al, 2007). We therefore expect associated activity in these regions for the ACT-R model of pronoun resolution.…”

Section: Current Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Modeling Brain Activity Associated with Pronoun Resolution in English and Chinese

Li¹,

Fabre²,

Luh³

et al. 2018

Proceedings of the First Workshop on Computational Models Of Reference, Anaphora and Coreference

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Typological differences between English and Chinese suggest stronger reliance on salience of the antecedent during pronoun resolution in Chinese. We examined this hypothesis by correlating a difficulty measure of pronoun resolution derived by the activation-based ACT-R model with the brain activity of English and Chinese participants listening to a same audiobook during fMRI recording. The ACT-R model predicts higher overall difficulty for English speakers, which is supported at the brain level in left Broca's area. More generally, it confirms that computational modeling approach is able to dissociate different dimensions that are involved in the complex process of pronoun resolution in the brain.

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Left cytoarchitectonic BA 44 processes syntactic gender violations in determiner phrases

Heim

Ermingen

Huber

et al. 2010

Human Brain Mapping

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Recent neuroimaging studies make contradictory predictions about the involvement of left Brodmann's area (BA) 44 in processing local syntactic violations in determiner phrases (DPs). Some studies suggest a role for BA 44 in detecting local syntactic violations, whereas others attribute this function to the left premotor cortex. Therefore, the present event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study investigated whether left-cytoarchitectonic BA 44 was activated when German DPs involving syntactic gender violations were compared with correct DPs (correct: 'der Baum'-the[masculine] tree[masculine]; violated: 'das Baum'--the[neuter] tree[masculine]). Grammaticality judgements were made for both visual and auditory DPs to be able to generalize the results across modalities. Grammaticality judgements involved, among others, left BA 44 and left BA 6 in the premotor cortex for visual and auditory stimuli. Most importantly, activation in left BA 44 was consistently higher for violated than for correct DPs. This finding was behaviourally corroborated by longer reaction times for violated versus correct DPs. Additional brain regions, showing the same effect, included left premotor cortex, supplementary motor area, right middle and superior frontal cortex, and left cerebellum. Based on earlier findings from the literature, the results indicate the involvement of left BA 44 in processing local syntactic violations when these include morphological features, whereas left premotor cortex seems crucial for the detection of local word category violations.

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When sex meets syntactic gender on a neural basis during pronoun processing

Cited by 30 publications

References 70 publications

On sense and reference: Examining the functional neuroanatomy of referential processing

On sense and reference: Examining the functional neuroanatomy of referential processing

Modeling Brain Activity Associated with Pronoun Resolution in English and Chinese

Left cytoarchitectonic BA 44 processes syntactic gender violations in determiner phrases

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