The Role of Broca's Area in Sentence Comprehension

The role of Broca's area in sentence processing has been debated for the last 30 years. A central and still unresolved issue is whether Broca's area plays a specific role in some aspect of syntactic processing (e.g., syntactic movement, hierarchical structure building) or whether it serves...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of cognitive neuroscience 2011-07, Vol.23 (7), p.1664-1680
Main Authors: Rogalsky, Corianne, Hickok, Gregory
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Brain
Brain Hemisphere Functions
Brain Mapping
Cognition & reasoning
Cognitive Processes
Comprehension
Frontal Lobe - physiology
Humans
Language Processing
Linguistics
Memory
Memory, Short-Term - physiology
Neurosciences
Phonetics
Phonology
Reading comprehension
Research Methodology
Role
Sentences
Short Term Memory
Syntax
Verbal Ability
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Summary:The role of Broca's area in sentence processing has been debated for the last 30 years. A central and still unresolved issue is whether Broca's area plays a specific role in some aspect of syntactic processing (e.g., syntactic movement, hierarchical structure building) or whether it serves a more general function on which sentence processing relies (e.g., working memory). This review examines the functional organization of Broca's area in regard to its contributions to sentence comprehension, verbal working memory, and other multimodal cognitive processes. We suggest that the data are consistent with the view that at least a portion of the contribution of Broca's area to sentence comprehension can be attributed to its role as a phonological short-term memory resource. Furthermore, our review leads us to conclude that there is no compelling evidence that there are sentence-specific processing regions within Broca's area.
ISSN:0898-929X
1530-8898
DOI:10.1162/jocn.2010.21530