PMID- 22629366
OWN - NLM
STAT- MEDLINE
DCOM- 20121217
LR  - 20240313
IS  - 1932-6203 (Electronic)
IS  - 1932-6203 (Linking)
VI  - 7
IP  - 5
DP  - 2012
TI  - Left inferior frontal activations depending on the canonicity determined by the 
      argument structures of ditransitive sentences: an MEG study.
PG  - e37192
LID - 10.1371/journal.pone.0037192 [doi]
LID - e37192
AB  - To elucidate the relationships between syntactic and semantic processes, one 
      interesting question is how syntactic structures are constructed by the argument 
      structure of a verb, where each argument corresponds to a semantic role of each 
      noun phrase (NP). Here we examined the effects of possessivity [sentences with or 
      without a possessor] and canonicity [canonical or noncanonical word orders] using 
      Japanese ditransitive sentences. During a syntactic decision task, the syntactic 
      structure of each sentence would be constructed in an incremental manner based on 
      the predicted argument structure of the ditransitive verb in a verb-final 
      construction. Using magnetoencephalography, we found a significant canonicity 
      effect on the current density in the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) at 530-550 
      ms after the verb onset. This effect was selective to canonical sentences, and 
      significant even when the precedent NP was physically identical. We suggest that 
      the predictive effects associated with syntactic processing became larger for 
      canonical sentences, where the NPs and verb were merged with a minimum structural 
      distance, leading to the left IFG activations. For monotransitive and 
      intransitive verbs, in which structural computation of the sentences was simpler 
      than that of ditransitive sentences, we observed a significant effect selective 
      to noncanonical sentences in the temporoparietal regions during 480-670 ms. This 
      effect probably reflects difficulty in semantic processing of noncanonical 
      sentences. These results demonstrate that the left IFG plays a predictive role in 
      syntactic processing, which depends on the canonicity determined by argument 
      structures, whereas other temporoparietal regions would subserve more semantic 
      aspects of sentence processing.
FAU - Inubushi, Tomoo
AU  - Inubushi T
AD  - Department of Basic Science, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University 
      of Tokyo, Komaba, Meguro-ku, Tokyo, Japan.
FAU - Iijima, Kazuki
AU  - Iijima K
FAU - Koizumi, Masatoshi
AU  - Koizumi M
FAU - Sakai, Kuniyoshi L
AU  - Sakai KL
LA  - eng
PT  - Journal Article
PT  - Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
DEP - 20120522
PL  - United States
TA  - PLoS One
JT  - PloS one
JID - 101285081
SB  - IM
MH  - Adult
MH  - Brain Mapping
MH  - Female
MH  - Frontal Lobe/*physiology
MH  - Humans
MH  - *Language
MH  - Linguistics
MH  - Magnetoencephalography
MH  - Male
MH  - Speech Perception/*physiology
PMC - PMC3358340
COIS- Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
EDAT- 2012/05/26 06:00
MHDA- 2012/12/18 06:00
PMCR- 2012/05/22
CRDT- 2012/05/26 06:00
PHST- 2012/02/23 00:00 [received]
PHST- 2012/04/18 00:00 [accepted]
PHST- 2012/05/26 06:00 [entrez]
PHST- 2012/05/26 06:00 [pubmed]
PHST- 2012/12/18 06:00 [medline]
PHST- 2012/05/22 00:00 [pmc-release]
AID - PONE-D-12-06003 [pii]
AID - 10.1371/journal.pone.0037192 [doi]
PST - ppublish
SO  - PLoS One. 2012;7(5):e37192. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0037192. Epub 2012 May 22.