Distinguishing Syntactic Operations in the Brain: Dependency and Phrase-Structure Parsing

Alessandro Lopopolo; Antal van den Bosch; Karl-Magnus Petersson; Roel M Willems

doi:10.1162/nol_a_00029

Distinguishing Syntactic Operations in the Brain: Dependency and Phrase-Structure Parsing

Neurobiol Lang (Camb). 2021 Feb 1;2(1):152-175. doi: 10.1162/nol_a_00029. eCollection 2021.

Authors

Alessandro Lopopolo^{1

2}, Antal van den Bosch³, Karl-Magnus Petersson⁴, Roel M Willems^{2

4

5}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Psychology, University of Potsdam, Germany.
² Center for Language Studies, Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands.
³ Meertens Institute, Royal Netherlands Academy of Science and Arts, Amsterdam, Netherlands.
⁴ Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, Netherlands.
⁵ Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour, Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands.

Abstract

Finding the structure of a sentence-the way its words hold together to convey meaning-is a fundamental step in language comprehension. Several brain regions, including the left inferior frontal gyrus, the left posterior superior temporal gyrus, and the left anterior temporal pole, are supposed to support this operation. The exact role of these areas is nonetheless still debated. In this paper we investigate the hypothesis that different brain regions could be sensitive to different kinds of syntactic computations. We compare the fit of phrase-structure and dependency structure descriptors to activity in brain areas using fMRI. Our results show a division between areas with regard to the type of structure computed, with the left anterior temporal pole and left inferior frontal gyrus favouring dependency structures and left posterior superior temporal gyrus favouring phrase structures.

Keywords: anterior temporal pole; dependency grammar; functional MRI; neural basis of syntactic processing; phrase structure grammar; superior temporal gyrus.