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Record W2781969093 · doi:10.82308/53457

fMRI studies of Broca's area in sentence comprehension

2007· dissertation· en· W2781969093 on OpenAlexfundno aff
Andrea Santi

Bibliographic record

VenueeScholarship@McGill (McGill) · 2007
Typedissertation
Languageen
FieldNeuroscience
TopicNeurobiology of Language and Bilingualism
Canadian institutionsnot available
FundersNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of CanadaMcGill University
KeywordsBroca's areaSentenceComprehensionPsychologyLinguisticsNatural language processingComputer scienceCognitive psychologyPhilosophy

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Broca's Area (ie, Brodmann Areas (BA) 44 and 45) has been associated with syntactic comprehension since the 1970s. In particular, aphasia and neuroimaging studies have shown that Broca's area distinguishes between sentences with subject extraction (ie, The horse that ▪ is kicking the bear is brown) compared to object extraction (ie, The horse that the bear is kicking ▪ is brown). The extracted argument is referred to as a filler and the position from which it is extracted is referred to as a gap and the relationship between them as a filler-gap dependency. Based on these results, functional accounts of Broca's area in sentence comprehension have been formulated that range from verbal Working Memory (WM) to General-Syntactic to Specific-Syntactic. Predictions of these three types of accounts were tested across 4 fMRI studies. Study I contrasted long-distance argument extraction to another syntactic dependency---Reflexive Binding---to see if there was activation overlap in Broca's area for the two dependencies in accordance with a general WM (verbal or syntactic) account. Study II presented a methodological improvement on Study I by parametrically varying the distance of the dependent elements in both dependencies. The results from Study I and II indicate that Broca's area is sensitive to WM demands in sentences with extraction but not those with Reflexive Binding. Study III investigated fMRI adaptation to the two syntactic complexity factors---extraction type (object vs subject) and relative clause position (center-embedded vs right-branching). While anterior Broca's area (BA 45) adapted to extraction type only, posterior Broca's area (BA 44) adapted to both complexity factors. Finally, Study IV used parasitic gap constructions with their pronoun-containing alternative to investigate whether Broca's area is sensitive to gap-filling in addition to filler-to-gap distance. There was no evidence that Broca's area is sensitive to gap-filling in addition to filler-to-gap distance. Collectively, the results indicate that anterior aspects of Broca's area are specific to filler-gap dependencies and particularly to the filler-to-gap distance (ie, storage processes for the filler), whereas posterior aspects of Broca's area are more generally engaged in syntactic processing.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.002
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.003
Threshold uncertainty score0.007

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.002
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0010.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.063
GPT teacher head0.332
Teacher spread0.269 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations1
Published2007
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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