TY - JOUR
T1 - The role of Broca's area in sentence comprehension
AU - Rogalsky, Corianne
AU - Hickok, Gregory
PY - 2011/7
Y1 - 2011/7
N2 - The role of Broca's area in sentence processing has been debated for the last 30 years. A central and still unresolved issue is whether Broca's area plays a specific role in some aspect of syntactic processing (e.g., syntactic movement, hierarchical structure building) or whether it serves a more general function on which sentence processing relies (e.g., working memory). This review examines the functional organization of Broca's area in regard to its contributions to sentence comprehension, verbal working memory, and other multimodal cognitive processes. We suggest that the data are consistent with the view that at least a portion of the contribution of Broca's area to sentence comprehension can be attributed to its role as a phonological short-term memory resource. Furthermore, our review leads us to conclude that there is no compelling evidence that there are sentence-specific processing regions within Broca's area.
AB - The role of Broca's area in sentence processing has been debated for the last 30 years. A central and still unresolved issue is whether Broca's area plays a specific role in some aspect of syntactic processing (e.g., syntactic movement, hierarchical structure building) or whether it serves a more general function on which sentence processing relies (e.g., working memory). This review examines the functional organization of Broca's area in regard to its contributions to sentence comprehension, verbal working memory, and other multimodal cognitive processes. We suggest that the data are consistent with the view that at least a portion of the contribution of Broca's area to sentence comprehension can be attributed to its role as a phonological short-term memory resource. Furthermore, our review leads us to conclude that there is no compelling evidence that there are sentence-specific processing regions within Broca's area.
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U2 - 10.1162/jocn.2010.21530
DO - 10.1162/jocn.2010.21530
M3 - Review article
C2 - 20617890
AN - SCOPUS:79955791226
SN - 0898-929X
VL - 23
SP - 1664
EP - 1680
JO - Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
JF - Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
IS - 7
ER -