The objective outlined in this application is to investigate the neural regions involved in an early stage of sentence processing in which phrase-level constituent structure is parsed. The main hypothesis is that this stage of parsing occurs in a region of the anterior temporal lobe called the anterior temporal sentence area (ATSA), and that this area uses lexical, morphological, and prosodic information to process constituent relationships. This will be tested in three fMRI experiments. The first experiment will examine at what stage of sentence processing the ATSA is involved in by looking at its response to sentence fragments of varying size. We predict that the activation in the ATSA will vary as a function of fragment size. The second experiment will look at the response of the ATSA to morphological and lexical manipulations. We predict that activation in the ATSA will be altered by the removal of both morphological and lexical cues. Finally, the third experiment will investigate the influence of prosody on ATSA activation. We predict that disrupting sentence prosody will affect activation levels in the ATSA.
| Humphries, Colin; Liebenthal, Einat; Binder, Jeffrey R (2010) Tonotopic organization of human auditory cortex. Neuroimage 50:1202-11 |
| Humphries, Colin; Binder, Jeffrey R; Medler, David A et al. (2007) Time course of semantic processes during sentence comprehension: an fMRI study. Neuroimage 36:924-32 |
