Datensatz

Zusammenfassung

Neural correlates of gesture-syntax interaction. Thomas C. Gunter1, Leon Kroczek1, Henning Holle2, & Angela D. Friederici1 1Max-Planck-Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany 2Department of Psychology, University of Hull, Hull, UK In a communicative situation, gestures are an important source of information which also impacts speech processing. Gesture can for instance help when speech perception is troubled by noise (Obermeier et al., 2012) or when speech is ambiguous (Holle et al., 2007). Recently, we have shown that not only meaning, but also structural information (syntax) used during language comprehension is influenced by gestures (Holle et al., 2012). Beat gestures, which highlight particular words in a sentence, seem to be able to disambiguate sentences that are temporarily ambiguous with respect to their syntactic structure. Here we explored the underlying neural substrates of the gesture-syntax interaction with fMRI using similar ambiguous sentence material as Holle et al. (2012). Participants were presented with two types of sentence structures which were either easy (Subject-Object-Verb) or more difficult (Object-Subject-Verb) in their syntactic complexity. A beat gesture was shown either at the first or the second noun phrase (NP). Activations related to syntactic complexity were primarily lateralized to the left (IFG, pre-SMA, pre-central gyrus, and MTG) and bilateral for the Insula. A ROI-based analysis showed interactions of syntax and gesture in the left MTG, left pre-SMA, and in the bilateral Insula activations. The pattern of the interaction suggests that a beat on NP1 facilitates the easy SOV structure and inhibits the more difficult OSV structure and vise versa for a beat on NP2. Because the IFG was unaffected by beat gestures it seems to play an independent/isolated role in syntax processing.