Abstract
Previous research has shown effects of syntactic complexity on sentence processing. In linguistics, syntactic complexity (caused by different word orders) is traditionally explained by distinct linguistic operations. This study investigates whether different complex word orders indeed result in distinct patterns of neural activity, as would be expected when distinct linguistic operations are applied. Twenty-two older adults performed an auditory sentence processing paradigm in German with and without increased cognitive load. The results show that without increased cognitive load, complex sentences show distinct activation patterns compared with less complex, canonical sentences: complex object-initial sentences show increased activity in the left inferior frontal and temporal regions, whereas complex adjunct-initial sentences show increased activity in occipital and right superior frontal regions. Increased cognitive load seems to affect the processing of different sentence structures differently, increasing neural activity for canonical sentences, but leaving complex sentences relatively unaffected. We discuss these results in the context of the idea that linguistic operations required for processing sentence structures with higher levels of complexity involve distinct brain operations.
Highlights
It is well known in psycholinguistic research that some sentences are more difficult to process than others (e.g., Bader & Meng, 1999; Bahlmann, Rodriguez-Fornells, Rotte, & Münte, 2007; Tun, Benichov, & Wingfield, 2010)
Our main hypothesis was that distinct linguistic operations underlie the processing of different noncanonical sentences, which were predicted to be reflected in distinct patterns of neural activity
Object-initial sentences showed activity in the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and temporal regions, which are more frequently associated with object-initialization (Bahlmann et al, 2007; Bornkessel et al, 2005; Röder et al, 2002; Shetreet & Friedmann, 2014) and complex sentence processing in general (Rodd et al, 2015)
Summary
It is well known in psycholinguistic research that some sentences are more difficult to process than others (e.g., Bader & Meng, 1999; Bahlmann, Rodriguez-Fornells, Rotte, & Münte, 2007; Tun, Benichov, & Wingfield, 2010). About the possibly differential effects on processing of sentences with different syntactic complexities. We present an fMRI experiment that assesses how listeners process sentences with two different types of syntactic complexity at two levels of cognitive load and assess the brain mechanisms underlying their processing. The syntactic complexity of sentences can be varied through variations in word order. For German and English, standard (i.e., canonical) word order in a main clause is Subject (S)Verb (V)-Object (O; see, e.g., Zwart, 1997 for German). Speakers frequently use structures that deviate from canonical word order for, among other things, pragmatic reasons.
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