Broca’s area doesn’t care what you do (syntactically): it cares how you do it (actively)

Guest post by William Matchin:There are a few topics on this blog on the polemical spectrum that don’t happen to involve mirror neurons; one of them is the topic of Broca’s area and its putative role in syntax (see previous posts hereand here). Our recent paper published in Brain and Language – (Matchin, Sprouse & Hickok, 2014) - addresses this issue.http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0093934X14001278The hypotheses regarding syntax and Broca’s area were never ludicrous - the neuropsychological data suggesting a close link between Broca’s area and the grammar are quite striking, as well as compelling. Rather, there are two arguments, empirical and methodological, against these hypotheses: (1, empirical) these hypotheses ignore the fact that patients with agrammatic production and sentence comprehension issues appear to have intact syntactic competence, as shown by their ability to perform remarkably well on acceptability judgments (Linebarger et al., 1983), and (2, methodological) syntactic manipulations are often conflated with processing mechanisms – as such, increased activation in neuroimaging studies for, say, center-embedded sentences over right-branching sentences (Stromswold et al., 1996) may very well reflect computations related to how the sentences are handled (e.g., working memory), and not their syntactic properties. This makes interpretation of these kinds of neuroimaging results difficult – are the effects due to syntactic operat...
Source: Talking Brains - Category: Neurologists Authors: Source Type: blogs