Linguistics Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about Linguistics, including details on human language, phonetics, syntax, phonology.

Syntactic gender processing in the human brain: a review and a model.

Heim S

Research Centre Jülich, Institute for Neurosciences and Biophysics, Leo-Brandt-Strasse 5, 52425 Jülich, Germany. s.heim@fz-juelich.de

Despite the increasing number of neuroimaging studies of syntactic gender processing no model is currently available that includes data from visual and auditory language comprehension and language production. This paper provides a systematic review of the neural correlates of syntactic gender processing. Based on anatomical information from cytoarchitectonic probability maps it is argued that the left BA 44 plays a central role for the active use of gender information, e.g., for explicit decisions as well as for subsequent morphological encoding. The left BA 45 is involved in the strategic generation of morphological cues that facilitate gender processing. Model implications for aphasic patients with lesions including or excluding parts of Broca's speech region are discussed.

Published 11 June 2008 in Brain Lang, 106(1): 55-64.
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