The influence semantics on syntactic analysis: fMRI study

Trustees Of Indiana University, Bloomington IN

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Abstract

[unreadable] DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The goal of this proposal is to examine the impact of semantics on syntactic analysis. The experiments described use both behavioral measures and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the interaction between semantic and syntactic processing during sentence comprehension. There are two major aims of the proposal. The first is to obtain a better understanding of how highly familiar, world knowledge influences sentence comprehension processes. The second aim is to determine what aspects of syntactic processing are influenced by semantics. Recently, it has been proposed that syntactic processing occurs in at least two stages and it may be that semantic information has an impact on only one stage. Taken together, the proposed studies are designed to uncover some of the key aspects of semantic and syntactic processing as well as provide a greater understanding of the collaborative nature of these two essential language processes. The proposed experiments use novel experimental designs in order to provide not only a clearer depiction of the behavioral processing but also the underlying neural architecture that supports language. [unreadable] [unreadable] [unreadable]