Grammatical class modulates the (left) inferior frontal gyrus within 100 milliseconds

Date de l'évènement: 
Monday, 18 March, 2019

In an article in Scientific Reports, Francois-Xavier Alario (Language team) and colleagues showed showed rapid (from ~80 ms onwards) noun-verb differences in the left and (to a lesser extent) right inferior frontal gyri (IFG), but only when those nouns and verbs were preceded by the syntactically predictive context (i.e. their corresponding pronoun).This suggests that syntactic unification manifests very early on during processing in the LIFG. The speed of such syntactic unification operations is hypothesized to be driven by predictive top-down activations stemming from a domain-general network in the prefrontal cortex. open access