Ventral Premotor Cortex Lesions disrupt learning of sequential syntactic structures
نویسندگان
چکیده
Recent fMRI evidence shows differential involvement of the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and the ventral premotor cortex (PMv) in syntactic processing. Our main goal is to specify the precise role of the PMv in the processing sequential structures and whether these processes are a necessary prerequisite for the successful acquisition of linguistic syntax. We tested patients with PMv lesions in an artificial grammar (AG) learning task. Compared to matched controls patients exhibited impaired acquisition of the AG. This impairment was more pronounced for local (referring to adjacent elements within an AG string) as for longdistance dependencies (incorporating recursive structures). This effect was paralleled by a selective reduction of the P600 in response to violations of local dependencies. Crucially, the P600 elicited by violations of long-distance dependencies was comparable between groups. Together, behavioral and ERP results indicate a PMv involvement in processing local sequential information.
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