English
 
Help Privacy Policy Disclaimer
  Advanced SearchBrowse
  1. View item / 
  2. Item Summary

Item

ITEM ACTIONSEXPORT
Add to Basket
  Local TagsRelease HistoryDetailsSummary

Released
Journal Article

The anterior left inferior frontal gyrus contributes to semantic unification

MPS-Authors
/persons/resource/persons69

Hagoort,  Peter
FC Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging , External Organizations;
Neurobiology of Language Department, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;
Radboud University Nijmegen;

/persons/resource/persons6

Bastiaansen,  Marcel C. M.
FC Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging , External Organizations;
Neurobiology of Language Department, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;
Radboud University Nijmegen;

External Resource
No external resources are shared
Fulltext (restricted access)
There are currently no full texts shared for your IP range.
Fulltext (public)

Zhu_et_al_NeuroImage_2012.pdf
(Publisher version), 823KB

Supplementary Material (public)

Zhu_2012_suppl.dot
(Supplementary material), 49KB

Citation

Zhu, Z., Hagoort, P., Zhang, J. X., Feng, G., Chen, H.-C., Bastiaansen, M. C. M., et al. (2012). The anterior left inferior frontal gyrus contributes to semantic unification. NeuroImage, 60, 2230-2237. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2012.02.036.


Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-001M-0000-0012-29B3-6
Abstract
Semantic unification, the process by which small blocks of semantic information are combined into a coherent utterance, has been studied with various types of tasks. However, whether the brain activations reported in these studies are attributed to semantic unification per se or to other task-induced concomitant processes still remains unclear. The neural basis for semantic unification in sentence comprehension was examined using event-related potentials (ERP) and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). The semantic unification load was manipulated by varying the goodness of fit between a critical word and its preceding context (in high cloze, low cloze and violation sentences). The sentences were presented in a serial visual presentation mode. The participants were asked to perform one of three tasks: semantic congruency judgment (SEM), silent reading for comprehension (READ), or font size judgment (FONT), in separate sessions. The ERP results showed a similar N400 amplitude modulation by the semantic unification load across all of the three tasks. The brain activations associated with the semantic unification load were found in the anterior left inferior frontal gyrus (aLIFG) in the FONT task and in a widespread set of regions in the other two tasks. These results suggest that the aLIFG activation reflects a semantic unification, which is different from other brain activations that may reflect task-specific strategic processing.