日本語文では，名詞句の語順を入れ替えても文の内容は変わらない．これは言語には伝えたい事柄を外部に伝えるための音形構造と言語の意味を理解するための意味構造があり，句の移動操作によって構造間め変換を行うことで様々な形式の文の理解や発話を可能にしているためと考えられている．本研究は，fMRIを用いて日本語における基本語順文（SOV）とかき混ぜ文（OSV）の処理過程の脳活動を比較したところ，文の理解課題と発話課題で共に統語処理に関連する左下前頭回（BA44/45）で，かき混ぜ文で基本語順文より高い活動が見られた．これにより，文理解と生成に共通して移動換作がBA44/45で行われていることが示唆された．%Switching the order of noun phrases in Japanese sentence does not change the meaning of the sentence. This is because language has two levels of representation. One is phonological structure for communicating with people. The other is semantic structure for comprehending the meaning of the language. Syntactic movement between these two structures enables humans to comprehend and product the various forms of language. We investigated brain regions related to syntactic movement in Japanese with fMRI. Results showed that the left inferior frontal gyrus (BA44/45) was significantly activated with scrambled sentence (OSV) than with canonical sentence (SOV) under both sentence comprehension and production task. The current study indicates the role of the left BA44/45 in syntactic movement that is common to both comprehension and production of sentence.
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