Left Inferior Frontal Activations Differentially Modulated by Scrambling in Ditransitive Sentences

摘要

In order to clarify the relationship among grammatical knowledge, processing components, and neuralsubstrates in sentence comprehension, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate how brain activationis affected by two types of scrambling (short scrambling and middle scrambling) in ditransitive sentences in Japanese.Short scrambling and middle scrambling enhanced activation in the anterior and posterior left inferior frontal gyrusrespectively. This finding accords with the view that the anterior left inferior frontal gyrus is involved in the automaticprocessing that establishes a dependency relation between a verb and its arguments, and the posterior left inferior frontalgyrus supports this kind of processing through its role in verbal working memory. This result is more congruent with aprocess-based approach to neural bases for sentence processing, which searches for neurological correlates ofpsycholinguistically defined processing components, than with a grammar-based approach, which probes neural networkswith the assumption that major grammatical operations are neurologically individuated.