Elsevier

Journal of Neurolinguistics

Volume 16, Issues 4–5, July–September 2003, Pages 277-300
Journal of Neurolinguistics

Functional MR imaging exposes differential brain responses to syntax and prosody during auditory sentence comprehension

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0911-6044(03)00026-5Get rights and content

Abstract

In two experiments using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging we studied healthy adults who listened to sentences that either focused on lexical, syntactic, or prosodic information. In the first experiment two sentence conditions were employed: normal speech which contained function and content words, and pseudo speech which contained function and pseudo words. Sentence processing generally activated the superior temporal region (STR) bilaterally. Relative to normal sentences hearing pseudo sentences corresponded to stronger brain responses in the anterior STR (planum polare) and in the fronto-opercular region bilaterally. A second experiment was designed to test whether right hemisphere activation can be explained by processing prosodic aspects of speech, i.e. sentence intonation. In addition to normal and pseudo speech the second study examined degraded speech that neither contained morphosyntactic nor lexical information but only prosodic information, i.e. intonation, amplitude, duration, and spectral tilt. Statistical analyses based on regions of interest found differential activation patterns for frontal and temporal areas in the brain. Relative to sentences, degraded speech produced generally stronger activation in frontal regions. Furthermore, the data pointed to a particular involvement of right fronto-lateral regions in processing sentence melody. For the STR an inverse pattern was found: relative to degraded speech sentence conditions produced stronger activation in anterior, mid, and posterior parts of the left supratemporal plane, particular in the planum polare and planum temporale. In sum, the results show that the left planum polare and the left planum temporale mediate syntactic and semantic processing, whereas right fronto-lateral areas seem to be more sensitive to prosodic cues available in spoken language.

Introduction

Since several neurologists in the 19th century (Paul Broca, Marc Dax, Carl Wernicke) claimed its involvement in language functions, the brain's left hemisphere has been viewed as the language dominant one. Their observations indicated that lesions in anterior and posterior parts of the left peri-sylvian region1 caused severe deficits in producing and comprehending speech. To date, most neurological textbooks still favour the traditional view which holds that language functions reside in Broca's and Wernicke's area (Stowe, Haverkort, & Zwarts, 2003). Originally, Broca's area2 was depicted as subserving speech production exclusively whereas Wernicke's area3 was assigned to aspects of speech comprehension. However, in the 20th century neurolinguistics has provided evidence that a lesion in Broca's area and the surrounding tissue also affects complex sentence comprehension, in particular syntactic processing (Carramazza & Zurif, 1976, for a review see Grodzinsky, 2000). Thus, since then Broca's area has been proposed as the seat of syntax in the brain for both speech production and comprehension even though Broca's aphasics have been shown to make use of syntactic knowledge (Linebarger, Schwartz, & Saffran, 1983).

To date two aspects of the traditional claim have been called into question: the first aspect considers the specificity of Broca's area with respect to syntactic processing. Secondly, the left hemisphere's preponderance for language functions is still a matter of debate since recent neuroimaging studies have shown that speech processing also involves areas in the right hemisphere (Binder et al., 2000, Burton, 2001, Burton et al., 2000, Caplan and Dapretto, 2001, Hickok and Pöppel, 2000, Meyer et al., 2000, Vouloumanos et al., 2001). With respect to the former aspect, lesion studies investigating patients who display symptoms of agrammatism suggested that Broca's area is the locus of syntactic processing. The widely held belief that Broca's area is specifically associated with syntactic processing has been supported by recent neuroimaging studies (Caplan et al., 1998, Caplan et al., 1999, Caplan et al., 2000, Dapretto and Bookheimer, 1999, Embick et al., 2000, Inui et al., 1998, Kang et al., 1999, Ni et al., 2000). This assertion, however, has been called into question by other recent neuroimaging investigations suggesting that Broca's area is involved in a wide range of cognitive and perceptuomotor functions generally subserving language as well as nonlinguistic processes, for example, the analyses of lexical–semantic information (Poldrack et al.,1999), harmonic sequences (Maess, Kölsch, Gunter, & Friederici, 2001), slow tonal frequency glides (Müller, Kleinhans, & Courchesne, 2001), visually prompted digit sequence learning (Müller, Kleinhans, Pierce, Kemmotsu, & Courchesne, 2002), perception of the rhythm of motion (Schubotz & von Cramon, 2001), imagery of motion (Binkofski et al., 2000), and to segmentation processes in speech perception (Burton et al., 2000). Furthermore, a review article on phonological studies by Pöppel provides evidence for an essential contribution of Broca's area to verbal working memory (Pöppel, 1996).

Taken together, these findings are inconsistent with an exclusively syntactic specialization of Broca's area. Moreover, those studies that assessed syntactic functions to Broca's area either confounded syntactic complexity and verbal working memory demands, or syntactic and semantic processing under the same task instructions (Bavelier et al., 1997, Caplan et al., 1998, Dapretto and Bookheimer, 1999). A recent fMRI study investigating syntactic complexity and working memory demands separately demonstrated that activation in Broca's area reflects syntactic working memory requirements rather than syntactic complexity (Fiebach, Schlesewsky, & Friederici, 2001). Thus, it seems that the functional role of Broca's area cannot be claimed to be uniquely syntactic.

An additional challenge for the view that the language relevant areas are exclusively located in the left hemisphere comes from studies that investigated sentence-level syntactic processing (Just et al., 1996, Keller et al., 2001, Meyer et al., 2000, Müller et al., 1997, Newman et al., 2001, Sakai et al., 2001, Vandenberghe et al., 2002). These studies reported bilateral peri-sylvian regions to be involved whenever a resting period or auditory non-speech stimuli served as baselines. A substantial involvement of the right hemisphere was observed whenever sentences were presented auditorily (Mazoyer et al., 1993, Meyer et al., 2000, Müller et al., 1997) suggesting that the comprehension of auditorily presented normal sentences, in particular, recruits bilateral areas in the peri-sylvian region. However, the investigation of normal sentence comprehension (in comparison to such baselines) does not necessarily expose brain areas specifically involved in syntactic computation because in normal sentences syntactic cues are confounded with lexical–semantic information. The present article aims to address some of the aforementioned issues. A first experiment was designed to identify brain areas specifically assigned to syntactic processing. To avoid any confound between the presence of lexical–semantic and syntactic cues we investigated the processing of pseudo speech which consists of grammatically correct sentences in which nouns, adjectives and verbs are replaced by pseudowords. By presenting pseudo speech we expected to activate the neural network subserving syntactic functions to a greater extent, because pseudo speech is thought to emphasize syntactic operations, i.e. building a sentence structure and dealing with morphosyntactic information. The second experiment was performed to identify the particular contribution of the right hemisphere in speech comprehension. To achieve this goal we constructed stimulus material which was free of lexical–semantic and syntactic information but preserved the prosodic cues (intonation contour) of normal sentences.

In this experiment, we compared (semantically) normal sentences and (semantically meaningless) pseudo sentences within one experimental paradigm.4

Section snippets

Materials and methods

Stimuli and design. All sentences were recorded by a trained female speaker in a soundproof room (IAC) and digitized at a 16 bit/41.1 kHz sampling rate. The mean length of the sentences in the normal speech condition was 3.4±SD 0.36 s, and in the syntactic speech condition 3.6±SD 0.35 s. The mean sound pressure level for the normal speech condition was 20 dB (SPL) and for the pseudo speech condition 21 dB (SPL).

Normal speech—Grammatically, semantically and phonologically correct sentences.

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Results

Performance data. The judgment performance revealed approximately perfect correctness of 96.61% (SE=1.26) for the normal speech, and 89.58% (SE=4.94) for the pseudo speech condition.

fMRI Data. For sentence processing, strong brain activation was observed in superior temporal regions (STR) for both normal and pseudo speech (see Fig. 1A and B).

This activation included the anterior STR (planum polare), the middle STR (Heschl's gyrus),6

Discussion

The results suggest that the cerebral network subserving auditory sentence comprehension involves temporal areas predominantly in the left, but also in the right hemisphere. Consistent with recent claims (Humphries et al., 2001, Mazoyer et al., 1993, Meyer et al., 2000, Müller et al., 1997, Schlosser et al., 1998, Stowe et al., 1998), sentences produced a large region of activation in STRs bilaterally with the anterior part (planum polare) playing a special role. This finding suggests that the

Materials and methods

Stimuli and design. To generate degraded speech, normal speech files were treated by applying the PURR-filtering procedure (Sonntag & Portele, 1998). The segmental content, i.e. the spectral qualities of the speech signal were completely removed from the signal. In more detail, pitch marks were extracted from the original signal and then dynamically low-pass filtered with a cut-off frequency up to the third harmonic. The cut-off frequency of the unvoiced segments, i.e. of the aperiodical parts

Results

Performance data. Passive/active judgment performance was almost perfect for the normal speech (93.35%, SE=2.77) and for the pseudo speech (91.76%, SE=2.90) conditions. Degraded speech produced responses at chance level (51.78%, SE=1.92), clearly demonstrating that pure speech melody cannot be syntactically or lexically decoded.

fMRI data. Analyses of inter-subject averaged responses revealed that hearing normal, pseudo and degraded speech consistently activated cortical segments along the

Discussion

Activation for pseudo speech relative to normal speech was greater bilaterally in the STR. This finding consistently replicates the activation pattern found in Experiment 1. In terms of pseudo speech all content words were replaced by phonotactically legal pseudowords. Thus, the increase in superior temporal activation may be taken to reflect additional processing when unknown pseudowords are heard and subjects failed to find an equivalent lexical entry. This explanation is also consistent with

Conclusion

The data obtained from the two experiments together suggests that normal auditory sentence comprehension occurs automatically, recruiting the STR bilaterally. As hypothesized, no significant activation was found in Broca's area for any sentence condition. This finding indirectly provides evidence for the view that Broca's area is attributed to domain-general rather than to specific linguistic processes (Kaan & Swaab, 2002; Meyer et al., 2000, Müller et al., 2001, Stowe et al., 2003). However,

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Alice Turk and Adam McNamara for helpful comments on the manuscript. The work was supported by the Leibniz Science Prize awarded to Angela Friederici.

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