Symbolic Systems Forum - Michal Ben-Shachar, Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Psychology

Title:

functional MRI studies of long distance dependencies (or: some non-PR reasons to do functional imaging in linguistic research).

Abstract:

I will present a series of fMRI experiments focusing on comprehension of

Hebrew sentences with long distance dependencies (relative clauses,

wh-questions, topicalization). These sentences, compared to carefully

matched control sentences, give rise to a consistent pattern of brain

activation, across constructions and tasks. Brain regions activated by long

distance dependencies include left inferior frontal gyrus and bilateral

posterior superior temporal sulci. Different patterns of activation were

found for other structural contrasts, for example comparing sentences with

verbs that take 1 or 2 complements. I will demonstrate how this effect can

be utilized further to test competing theories of certain constructions,

such as double objects. The results will be discussed in the context of

current models of syntactic processing in the brain.