The effect of presentation paradigm on syntactic processing: An event‐related fMRI study

An event‐related fMRI study was conducted to investigate the effect of two different sentence presentation paradigms—rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) and whole sentence presentation—on syntactic processing. During scanning, sentences were presented using one of the two presentation paradigms and were followed by a short delay and a probe to verify sentence comprehension. The delay was included in an attempt to separate sentence‐related activity from probe‐related activity. The behavioral data showed a main effect of syntactic complexity for reaction time and accuracy, and accuracy revealed an interaction between complexity and the presentation paradigm employed—RSVP produced many more errors for syntactically complex sentences than did whole sentence presentation. The imaging data revealed a syntactic complexity effect during the sentence phase in left BA 44 and during the probe phase in left BA 44 and the left posterior MTG. In addition, timecourse analysis revealed that these two regions also showed an interaction between complexity and presentation paradigm such that there was no complexity effect during RSVP but a significant effect during whole sentence presentation. In addition to finding that these two presentation paradigms differentially affected syntactic processing, there were main effects within the visual pathway (V1/V2 vs. V5) and the hippocampus that revealed significant differences in activation between the paradigms. Hum Brain Mapp, 2010. © 2009 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.

[1]  M. Kutas,et al.  Brain potentials during reading reflect word expectancy and semantic association , 1984, Nature.

[2]  M. Kutas,et al.  Who Did What and When? Using Word- and Clause-Level ERPs to Monitor Working Memory Usage in Reading , 1995, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[3]  Herre van Oostendorp,et al.  Cognitive Aspects of Electronic Text Processing , 1996 .

[4]  J. Gee,et al.  Large-scale neural network for sentence processing , 2006, Brain and Language.

[5]  Matthias Schlesewsky,et al.  Processing linguistic complexity and grammaticality in the left frontal cortex. , 2005, Cerebral cortex.

[6]  J. Gee,et al.  Neural basis for sentence comprehension: Grammatical and short‐term memory components , 2002, Human brain mapping.

[7]  B. Postle,et al.  Using event-related fMRI to assess delay-period activity during performance of spatial and nonspatial working memory tasks. , 2000, Brain research. Brain research protocols.

[8]  J. D. McGaugh.  Memory--a century of consolidation. , 2000, Science.

[9]  T. Ditman,et al.  An investigation of concurrent ERP and self-paced reading methodologies. , 2007, Psychophysiology.

[10]  Karl J. Friston,et al.  Multisubject fMRI Studies and Conjunction Analyses , 1999, NeuroImage.

[11]  Gary S. Rubin,et al.  Reading without saccadic eye movements , 1992, Vision Research.

[12]  R. Reid,et al.  Saccadic Eye Movements Modulate Visual Responses in the Lateral Geniculate Nucleus , 2002, Neuron.

[13]  L. Davachi,et al.  Hippocampal contributions to episodic encoding: insights from relational and item-based learning. , 2002, Journal of neurophysiology.

[14]  E. R. Cohen,et al.  Close correlation between activity in brain area MT/V5 and the perception of a visual motion aftereffect , 1998, Current Biology.

[15]  Patrice French,et al.  Semantic and syntactic factors in the perception of rapidly presented sentences , 1981 .

[16]  M. Just,et al.  Working memory constraints on the processing of syntactic ambiguity , 1992, Cognitive Psychology.

[17]  Sharon L. Thompson-Schill,et al.  Conceptual Representations of Action in the Lateral Temporal Cortex , 2005, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[18]  L. Squire,et al.  Retrograde amnesia and memory consolidation: a neurobiological perspective , 1995, Current Opinion in Neurobiology.

[19]  Peter F. Liddle,et al.  Reading Anomalous Sentences: An Event-Related fMRI Study of Semantic Processing , 2002, NeuroImage.

[20]  V. M. Holmes,et al.  Perceptual Complexity and Underlying Sentence Structure , 1972 .

[21]  A. A. Wijers,et al.  Activations of “motor” and other non-language structures during sentence comprehension , 2004, Brain and Language.

[22]  C. Blakemore,et al.  The site of saccadic suppression , 2004, Nature Neuroscience.

[23]  David E. Kieras,et al.  New methods in reading comprehension research , 1986 .

[24]  G. Waters,et al.  Vascular responses to syntactic processing: Event‐related fMRI study of relative clauses , 2002, Human brain mapping.

[25]  Matthias Schlesewsky,et al.  The emergence of the unmarked: A new perspective on the language‐specific function of Broca's area , 2005, Human brain mapping.

[26]  K. Forster,et al.  Semantic heuristics and syntactic analysis , 1973 .

[27]  Yosef Grodzinsky,et al.  Neuroimaging of syntax and syntactic processing , 2006, Current Opinion in Neurobiology.

[28]  R. Turner,et al.  Characterizing Evoked Hemodynamics with fMRI , 1995, NeuroImage.

[29]  G. Waters,et al.  PET Studies of Syntactic Processing with Auditory Sentence Presentation , 1999, NeuroImage.

[30]  H. Eichenbaum.  Hippocampus Cognitive Processes and Neural Representations that Underlie Declarative Memory , 2004, Neuron.

[31]  James J. Pekar,et al.  Differential components of sentence comprehension: Beyond single word reading and memory , 2006, NeuroImage.

[32]  Alex A. Knopman.  Neural basis of semantic memory , 2008, Acta Neuropsychiatrica.

[33]  E. Tulving,et al.  Episodic and declarative memory: Role of the hippocampus , 1998, Hippocampus.

[34]  Angela D. Friederici,et al.  Who did what to whom? The neural basis of argument hierarchies during language comprehension , 2005, NeuroImage.

[35]  C. Fiebach,et al.  Distinct neural correlates of legal and illegal word-order variations in German: How can fMRI inform cognitive models of sentence processing? , 2004 .

[36]  Bernard Mazoyer,et al.  Meta-analyzing left hemisphere language areas: Phonology, semantics, and sentence processing , 2006, NeuroImage.

[37]  E. Zarahn.  Testing for Neural Responses during Temporal Components of Trials with BOLD fMRI , 2000, NeuroImage.

[38]  Chien-Hsiung Chen,et al.  The Use of Dynamic Display to Improve Reading Comprehension for the Small Screen of a Wrist Watch , 2007, HCI.

[39]  C. Fiebach,et al.  Revisiting the role of Broca's area in sentence processing: Syntactic integration versus syntactic working memory , 2005, Human brain mapping.

[40]  Sharlene D. Newman,et al.  Off‐line sentence processing: What is involved in answering a comprehension probe? , 2009, Human brain mapping.

[41]  A D Friederici,et al.  Syntactic Working Memory and the Establishment of Filler-Gap Dependencies: Insights from ERPs and fMRI , 2001, Journal of psycholinguistic research.

[42]  G. Waters,et al.  Verbal working memory and sentence comprehension , 1999, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[43]  David Caplan,et al.  Effects of Syntactic Structure and Propositional Number on Patterns of Regional Cerebral Blood Flow , 1998, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[44]  Kuniyoshi L Sakai,et al.  Specialization in the Left Prefrontal Cortex for Sentence Comprehension , 2002, Neuron.

[45]  David Caplan,et al.  Task-dependent and task-independent neurovascular responses to syntactic processing , 2008, Cortex.

[46]  Staffan Björk,et al.  Evaluating Sonified Rapid Serial Visual Presentation: An Immersive Reading Experience on a Mobile Device , 2002, User Interfaces for All.

[47]  Kenneth I. Forster,et al.  Visual perception of rapidly presented word sequences of varying complexity , 1970 .

[48]  Sharlene D. Newman,et al.  Differential effects of syntactic and semantic processing on the subregions of Broca's area. , 2003, Brain research. Cognitive brain research.

[49]  Karl J. Friston,et al.  Conjunction revisited , 2005, NeuroImage.

[50]  Richard Shillcock,et al.  The On-line Study of Sentence Comprehension , 2004 .

[51]  M. D’Esposito,et al.  A Trial-Based Experimental Design for fMRI , 1997, NeuroImage.

[52]  J. Woolley,et al.  Paradigms and processes in reading comprehension. , 1982, Journal of experimental psychology. General.

[53]  G. Waters,et al.  The capacity theory of sentence comprehension: critique of Just and Carpenter (1992) , 1996, Psychological review.

[54]  Jesper Andersson,et al.  Valid conjunction inference with the minimum statistic , 2005, NeuroImage.

[55]  Edward Gibson,et al.  The nature of working memory capacity in sentence comprehension : Evidence against domain-specific working memory resources , 2006 .

[56]  Colin M. Brown,et al.  ERP effects of listening to speech compared to reading: the P600/SPS to syntactic violations in spoken sentences and rapid serial visual presentation , 2000, Neuropsychologia.

[57]  M. Just,et al.  Brain Activation Modulated by Sentence Comprehension , 1996, Science.

[58]  J. Juola,et al.  Reading with and without eye movements: reply to Just, Carpenter, and Woolley. , 1982, Journal of experimental psychology. General.

[59]  Weijia Ni,et al.  Sentence complexity and input modality effects in sentence comprehension: an fMRI study , 2004, NeuroImage.

[60]  Kong-King Shieh,et al.  Reading a dynamic presentation of Chinese text on a single-line display , 2006, Displays.

[61]  Mary C. Potter,et al.  Rapid serial visual presentation (rsvp): a method for studying language processing , 2018 .

[62]  Gavriel Salvendy,et al.  Methods, techniques and tools in information design , 2007 .

[63]  M A Just,et al.  The capacity theory of comprehension: new frontiers of evidence and arguments. , 1996, Psychological review.

[64]  Barbara Beccue,et al.  Assessing the Impact of Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP): A Reading Technique , 2004, ISSADS.

[65]  K. Rayner.  Eye movements in reading and information processing: 20 years of research. , 1998, Psychological bulletin.

[66]  Barbara S. Chaparro,et al.  Exploring Effects of Speed and Font Size with RSVP , 2001 .

[67]  J. Juola,et al.  Visual search and reading of rapid serial presentations of letter strings, words, and text. , 1982 .

[68]  William F. Eddy,et al.  Time Course of fMRI-Activation in Language and Spatial Networks during Sentence Comprehension , 1999, NeuroImage.

[69]  Erica B. Michael,et al.  fMRI investigation of sentence comprehension by eye and by ear: Modality fingerprints on cognitive processes , 2001, Human brain mapping.

[70]  Michael A. Kraut,et al.  Comprar Neural Basis of Semantic Memory | John Hart | 9780521848701 | Cambridge University Press , 2007 .

[71]  D. Caplan.  Functional Neuroimaging Studies of Syntactic Processing , 2001, Journal of psycholinguistic research.

[72]  Constantine Stephanidis,et al.  Universal Access Theoretical Perspectives, Practice, and Experience , 2003, Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

[73]  Paul Muter,et al.  Interface design and optimization of reading of continuous text , 1996 .

[74]  Jean-Luc Anton,et al.  Region of interest analysis using an SPM toolbox , 2010 .

[75]  J. Gee,et al.  Neural representation of verb meaning: An fMRI study , 2002, Human brain mapping.

[76]  M. Garrett,et al.  Syntactically Based Sentence Processing Classes: Evidence from Event-Related Brain Potentials , 1991, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[77]  M. Just,et al.  The neural bases of sentence comprehension: a fMRI examination of syntactic and lexical processing. , 2001, Cerebral cortex.