The goal of the proposed studies is to investigate the functional neuroanatomy of syntactic processing in sentence comprehension using functional neuroimaging. The proposed studies focus on three questions: 1. What are the patterns of blood flow associated with processing different syntactic structures? 2. Do these patterns differ as a function of the biological variables of age, sex and handedness? 3. Do these patterns differ as a function of the cognitive variables of working memory capacity, sentence processing proficiency, and bilingualism? The approach we will take to these questions is to study syntactic processing using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging. We will carry out a series of experiments in which subjects' processing of different syntactic structures is examined. We will investigate specific hypotheses that emerge from the literature and from our own work in the present grant cycle. 1. In right-handed, proficient language users, syntactic processing will activate left hemisphere perisylvian association cortex, with different operations activating different areas within this region. 2. Patterns of rCBF associated with processing specific syntactic structures will differ as a function of handedness but not age or sex. 3. Patterns of rCBF associated with processing specific syntactic structures will differ as a function of sentence processing proficiency, but not in the two languages of balanced bilinguals or as a function of working memory capacity. The proposed research will increase our knowledge of the neural basis of syntactic processing in sentence comprehension, extending the current database to previously unstudied syntactic operations and populations.
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