Left inferior frontal gyrus mediates morphosyntax: ERP evidence from verb processing in left-hemisphere damaged patients

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• 作者：Stefanie Regel^a ; ^{regel@cbs.mpg.de} ; Sonja A. Kotz^a ; ^b ; Ilona Henseler^a ; Angela D. Friederici^a
• 关键词：Event-related potentials (ERPs) ; Left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) ; Broca's area ; (Morpho-)syntax ; Language processing
• 刊名：Cortex
• 出版年：2017
• 出版时间：January 2017
• 年：2017
• 卷：86
• 期：Complete
• 页码：156-171
• 全文大小：1390 K
• 卷排序：86

文摘

Neurocognitive models of language comprehension have proposed different mechanisms with different neural substrates mediating human language processing. Whether the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) is engaged in morpho-syntactic information processing is currently still controversially debated. The present study addresses this issue by examining the processing of irregular verb inflection in real words (e.g., swim > swum > swam) and pseudowords (e.g., frim > frum > fram) by using event-related brain potentials (ERPs) in neurological patients with lesions in the LIFG involving Broca's area as well as healthy controls. Different ERP patterns in response to the grammatical violations were observed in both groups. Controls showed a biphasic negativity-P600 pattern in response to incorrect verb inflections whereas patients with LIFG lesions displayed a N400. For incorrect pseudoword inflections, a late positivity was found in controls, while no ERP effects were obtained in patients. These findings of different ERP patterns in the two groups strongly indicate an involvement of LIFG in morphosyntactic processing, thereby suggesting brain regions' specialization for different language functions.