Syntactic processing in the human brain: What we know, what we don’t know, and a suggestion for how to proceed
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Kanwisher_Syntactic processing.pdf
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Author(s)
Fedorenko, Evelina
Nieto-Castanon, Alfonso
Kanwisher, Nancy
Date Issued
February 2011
Journal
Brain and Language
Publisher
Elsevier
Citation
Fedorenko, Evelina, Alfonso Nieto-Castanon, and Nancy Kanwisher. “Syntactic Processing in the Human Brain: What We Know, What We Don’t Know, and a Suggestion for How to Proceed.” Brain and Language 120, no. 2 (February 2012): 187–207.
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Author's final manuscript
Abstract
For every claim in the neuroimaging literature about a particular brain region supporting syntactic processing, there exist other claims implicating the target region in different linguistic processes, and, in many cases, in non-linguistic cognitive processes (e.g., Blumstein, 2009). We argue that traditional group analysis methods in neuroimaging may obscure functional specificity because of inter-subject anatomical variability (Fedorenko & Kanwisher, 2009). In Fedorenko, Hsieh, Nieto-Castanon, Whitfield-Gabrieli, and Kanwisher (2010) we presented a functional localizer that allows quick and reliable identification of key language-sensitive regions in each individual brain. This approach enables pooling data from corresponding functional regions across subjects rather than from the same locations in stereotaxic space that may differ functionally due to inter-subject anatomical variability. In the current paper we demonstrate that the individual-subjects functional localization approach is superior to the traditional methods in its ability to distinguish among conditions in a brain region’s response. This ability is at the core of all neuroimaging research and is critical for answering questions of functional specialization (e.g., does a brain region specialize for processing syntactic aspects of the linguistic signal), which is in turn essential for making inferences about the precise computations conducted in each brain region. Based on our results, we argue that supplementing existing methods with an individual-subjects functional localization approach may lead to a clearer picture of the neural basis of syntactic processing, as it has in some other domains, such as high-level vision (e.g., Kanwisher, 2010) and social cognition (e.g., Saxe & Kanwisher, 2003).
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandl.2011.01.001
