Sentence Processing by Ear and by Eye 1 Running head: Sentence Processing by Ear and by Eye Sentence Processing by Ear and by Eye: homing in on the heteromodal language brain

fMRI was used to examine the brain activity of 18 young adults while they read or heard matched sentences that were either well-formed or contained anomalies of syntactic form or pragmatic content. We examined specific regions of interest (ROI) based on activity patterns found in earlier research. We sought: a) brain regions that respond robustly to both speech and print; b) regions that are sensitive to syntactic and/or pragmatic anomaly; c) regions that show modality convergence and anomaly sensitivity. In keeping with previous work, the activation maps showed major overlap in response to matched speech and print materials, and confirmed our expectation that anomalies would drive some cortical regions harder than non-anomalous control sentences. Two sites in inferior frontal gyrus were strongly activated by syntactic and pragmatic anomaly in both speech and print. In posterior regions, the pattern was differentiated; superior temporal and neighboring inferior parietal ROIs responded more strongly to syntactic anomaly than non-anomaly or pragmatic anomaly. An occipito-temporal ROI responded more to print than speech and more to either anomaly than to non-anomaly. While confirming the existence of specialized systems that are driven more by one or the other modality and type of anomaly, the findings identify components of an acrossmodal, predominantly left-hemisphere system capable of responding adaptively to varied sentence processing demands.