From Perception to Sentence Comprehension: The Convergence of Auditory and Visual Information of Language in the Left Inferior Frontal Cortex

We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to characterize cortical activation associated with sentence processing, thereby elucidating where in the brain auditory and visual inputs of words converge during sentence comprehension. Within one scanning session, subjects performed three types...

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Published inNeuroImage (Orlando, Fla.) Vol. 16; no. 4; pp. 883 - 900
Main Authors Homae, Fumitaka, Hashimoto, Ryuichiro, Nakajima, Kyoichi, Miyashita, Yasushi, Sakai, Kuniyoshi L.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States Elsevier Inc 01.08.2002
Elsevier Limited
Subjects
Adult
Auditory Pathways - physiology
Brain Mapping
Cognition - physiology
conjunction analysis
Dominance, Cerebral - physiology
fMRI
frontal cortex
Frontal Lobe - physiology
Humans
Language
lexico-semantics
Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Male
modality
Reading
Semantics
sentence processing
Speech Perception - physiology
Visual Pathways - physiology
fMRI
frontal cortex
conjunction analysis
modality
language
lexico-semantics
sentence processing
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Summary:We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to characterize cortical activation associated with sentence processing, thereby elucidating where in the brain auditory and visual inputs of words converge during sentence comprehension. Within one scanning session, subjects performed three types of tasks with different linguistic components from perception to sentence comprehension: nonword (N AV; auditory and visual), phrase (P; either auditory or visual), and sentence (S; either auditory or visual) tasks. In a comparison of the P and N AV tasks, the angular and supramarginal gyri showed bilateral activation, whereas the inferior and middle frontal gyri showed left-lateralized activation. A comparison of the S and P tasks, together with a conjunction analysis, revealed a ventral region of the left inferior frontal gyrus (F3t/F3O), which was sentence-processing selective and modality-independent. These results unequivocally demonstrated that the left F3t/F3O is involved in the selection and integration of semantic information that are separable from lexico-semantic processing.
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ISSN:1053-8119
1095-9572
DOI:10.1006/nimg.2002.1138