Neural correlates of morphosyntactic and verb-argument structure processing: An EfMRI study

In the current study, we investigated the processing of ungrammatical sentences containing morphosyntactic and verb-argument structure violations in an fMRI paradigm. In the morphosyntactic condition, participants listened to German perfect tense sentences with morphosyntactic violations which were neither related to finiteness nor to agreement but which were based on a syntactic feature mismatch between two verbal elements. When compared to correct sentences, morphosyntactically ungrammatical sentences elicited an increase in brain activity in the left middle to posterior superior temporal gyrus (STG). In the verb-argument structure condition, sentences were either correct or contained an intransitive verb with an unlicensed direct object. Ungrammatical sentences of this type elicited brain activations in the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) (BA 44). Thus, we found evidence for different brain activity patterns as a function of violation type. The left posterior STG, an area known to support lexical-syntactic integration was strongly implicated in morphosyntactic processing whereas the left dorsal IFG (BA 44) was seen to be involved in the processing of verb-argument structure. Our results suggest that lexical, syntactic and semantic features of verbal stimuli interact in a complex fashion during language comprehension.