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An Attempt to Conceptually Replicate the Dissociation between Syntax and Semantics during Sentence Comprehension.
Siegelman, Matthew; Blank, Idan A; Mineroff, Zachary; Fedorenko, Evelina.
Afiliación
  • Siegelman M; MIT, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences; Columbia University, Department of Psychology.
  • Blank IA; MIT, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences; UCLA, Department of Psychology.
  • Mineroff Z; MIT, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.
  • Fedorenko E; MIT, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences; MIT, McGovern Institute for Brain Research; MGH, Department of Psychiatry. Electronic address: evelina9@mit.edu.
Neuroscience ; 413: 219-229, 2019 08 10.
Article en En | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-31200104
Is sentence structure processed by the same neural and cognitive resources that are recruited for processing word meanings, or do structure and meaning rely on distinct resources? Linguistic theorizing and much behavioral evidence suggest tight integration between lexico-semantic and syntactic representations and processing. However, most current proposals of the neural architecture of language continue to postulate a distinction between the two. One of the earlier and most cited pieces of neuroimaging evidence in favor of this dissociation comes from a paper by Dapretto and Bookheimer (1999). Using a sentence-meaning judgment task, Dapretto & Bookheimer observed two distinct peaks within the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG): one was more active during a lexico-semantic manipulation, and the other during a syntactic manipulation. Although the paper is highly cited, no attempt has been made, to our knowledge, to replicate the original finding. We report an fMRI study that attempts to do so. Using a combination of whole-brain, group-level ROI, and participant-specific functional ROI approaches, we fail to replicate the original dissociation. In particular, whereas parts of LIFG respond reliably more strongly during lexico-semantic than syntactic processing, no part of LIFG (including in the region defined around the peak reported by Dapretto & Bookheimer) shows the opposite pattern. We speculate that the original result was a false positive, possibly driven by a small subset of participants or items that biased a fixed-effects analysis with low power.
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Texto completo: 1 Colección: 01-internacional Banco de datos: MEDLINE Asunto principal: Encéfalo / Comprensión / Lingüística Tipo de estudio: Prognostic_studies Límite: Adult / Female / Humans / Male Idioma: En Revista: Neuroscience Año: 2019 Tipo del documento: Article

Texto completo: 1 Colección: 01-internacional Banco de datos: MEDLINE Asunto principal: Encéfalo / Comprensión / Lingüística Tipo de estudio: Prognostic_studies Límite: Adult / Female / Humans / Male Idioma: En Revista: Neuroscience Año: 2019 Tipo del documento: Article