Sequential Processing of Lexical, Grammatical, and Phonological Information Within Broca’s Area
“Words, grammar, and phonology are linguistically distinct, yettheir neural substrates are difficult to distinguish in macroscopicbrain regions. We investigated whether they can be separatedin time and space at the circuit level using intracranial electrophysiology(ICE), namely by recording local field potentials from populationsof neurons using electrodes implanted in language-related brainregions while people read words verbatim or grammatically inflectedthem (present/past or singular/plural). Neighboring probes withinBroca’s area revealed distinct neuronal activity for lexical(~200 milliseconds), grammatical (~320 milliseconds), and phonological(~450 milliseconds) processing, identically for nouns and verbs,in a region activated in the same patients and task in functionalmagnetic resonance imaging. This suggests that a linguisticprocessing sequence predicted on computational grounds is implementedin the brain in fine-grained spatiotemporally patterned activity.”
The abstract of a new article studying the functions of Broca’s area by Ned T. Sahin, Steven Pinker, Sydney S. Cash, Donald Schomer, and Eric Halgren. If you’re a student and can connect to your Library’s server (or if you have a subscription), you can read the full text in the current issue of Science (10/16).
-
thekeri liked this
-
taf liked this
-
littlepotato liked this
-
loscheiner liked this
-
melissacullens reblogged this from loscheiner and added:
NPR this morning
-
loscheiner posted this
