Paper Info
Title
Stimulating the brain's language network: Syntactic ambiguity resolution after tms to the inferior frontal gyrus and middle temporal gyrus
Abstract
The posterior middle temporal gyrus (MTG) and inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) are two critical nodes of the brain's language network. Previous neuroimaging evidence has supported a dissociation in language comprehension in which parts of the MTG are involved in the retrieval of lexical syntactic information and the IFG in unification operations that maintain, select, and integrate multiple sources of information over time. In the present investigation, we tested for causal evidence of this dissociation by modulating activity in IFG and MTG using an offline TMS procedure: continuous theta-burst stimulation. Lexical–syntactic retrieval was manipulated by using sentences with and without a temporarily word-class (noun/verb) ambiguity (e.g., run). In one group of participants, TMS was applied to the IFG and MTG, and in a control group, no TMS was applied. Eye movements were recorded and quantified at two critical sentence regions: a temporarily ambiguous region and a disambiguating region. Results show that stimulation of the IFG led to a modulation of the ambiguity effect (ambiguous–unambiguous) at the disambiguating sentence region in three measures: first fixation durations, total reading times, and regressive eye movements into the region. Both IFG and MTG stimulation modulated the ambiguity effect for total reading times in the temporarily ambiguous sentence region relative to the control group. The current results demonstrate that an offline repetitive TMS protocol can have influences at a different point in time during online processing and provide causal evidence for IFG involvement in unification operations during sentence comprehension.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1162/jocn_a_00430
Cognitive Neuroscience, Journal of
Keywords
Field
DocType
psycholinguistics
Cognitive psychology,Psychology,Eye movement,Ambiguity effect,Syntactic ambiguity,Ambiguity,Inferior frontal gyrus,Syntax,Sentence,Middle temporal gyrus
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
25
10
0898-929X
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
5
0.44
3
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Daniel J. Acheson1151.87
Peter Hagoort230466.52