Neural bases of event knowledge and syntax integration in comprehension of complex sentences |
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| Authors: | Evie Malaia Sharlene Newman |
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| Institution: | 1. Department of Curriculum and Instruction, Center for Mind, Brain, and Education, University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, TX, USAmalaia@uta.edu;3. Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Cognitive Neuroimaging Laboratory, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA |
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| Abstract: | Comprehension of complex sentences is necessarily supported by both syntactic and semantic knowledge, but what linguistic factors trigger a readers’ reliance on a specific system? This functional neuroimaging study orthogonally manipulated argument plausibility and verb event type to investigate cortical bases of the semantic effect on argument comprehension during reading. The data suggest that telic verbs facilitate online processing by means of consolidating the event schemas in episodic memory and by easing the computation of syntactico-thematic hierarchies in the left inferior frontal gyrus. The results demonstrate that syntax–semantics integration relies on trade-offs among a distributed network of regions for maximum comprehension efficiency. |
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| Keywords: | verb argument working memory strategy syntax |
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