Form versus meaning in the brain

Abstract

There is a growing amount of evidence that processing form aspects of language (e.g. sentence structure) is different from processing meaning. Thus far, most data have come from aphasia and studies using behavioral and electrophysiological measures. However, these techniques do not allow us to infer that form and meaning involve distinct areas of the brain in neurologically unimpaired subjects. Ni et al. have conducted an fMRI study with healthy volunteers to try and answer this question 1 Ni W. et al. An event-related neuroimaging study distinguishing form and content in sentence processing. J. Cogn. Neurosci. 2000; 12: 120-133 Crossref PubMed Scopus (306) Google Scholar . Subjects listened to a series of sentences, some of which contained a form error (e.g. ‘Trees can grew’), while others were anomalous in meaning (e.g. ‘Trees can eat’). The form errors triggered an increase in activation in Broca’s area (left inferior frontal area), whereas the meaning anomalies showed more activation in superior temporal sites. The meaning anomalies also showed increased activation in middle and superior frontal sites. Similar patterns of activation were obtained whether the subjects’ task was to make acceptability judgements of the two types of sentences, or to detect whether the sentence referred to a living object (animacy detection task). These results therefore provide additional evidence that there is a specific processing mechanism for form aspects of language.