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Total neuron number in, and volume of, Brodmann areas (BA) 44 and 45 (Broca's area) were studied in Nissl-stained sections from the left and right hemispheres of five adult men and five adult women. The volume of BA 44 was greater in the left hemisphere than in the right in all ten cases, although asymmetry was only significant for the subgroup of male subjects. For six of the ten subjects (including...
The determining of brain regions that exhibit specific activity during sentence comprehension compared to other non- linguistic cognitive tasks constitutes one of the important challenges in the domain of functional neuroimaging of the faculty of language. In the current paper we report an event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (ER-fMRI) experiment, in which we directly compared the cerebral...
The role of Broca's area in grammatical computation is unclear, because syntactic processing is often confounded with working memory, articulation, or semantic selection. Morphological processing potentially circumvents these problems. Using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we had 18 subjects silently inflect words or read them verbatim. Subtracting the activity pattern...
In a series of articles Ullman (2001, 2004; Ullman et al., 1997) has proposed that regular inflection is critically subserved by Broca's area. This suggestion is motivated by the finding that English speaking Broca's aphasics show selective deficits with regular inflection. Here we argue that this proposal does not hold cross-linguistically but is based on a confound between inflectional suffix and...
In this position paper we explore correspondence between neural systems for language and action starting from recent electrophysiological findings on the roles of posterior and frontal areas in goal-directed grasping actions. The paper compares the perceptual and motor organization for action and language, and discusses similarities between the impairments of apraxic and aphasic patients. Furthermore,...
Despite the presence of shared characteristics across the different domains modulating Broca's area activity (e.g., structural analogies, as between language and music, or representational homologies, as between action execution and action observation), the question of what exactly the common denominator of such diverse brain functions is, with respect to the function of Broca's area, remains largely...
Evidence from both behavioural and brain studies suggests that perception of actions and their outcomes may induce (overt or covert) production of related actions in perceivers. Three views of the proper function of such re-enactment have been suggested: imitation, identification, and anticipation. Here I propose that the proper function of re-enactment is to subserve anticipation of upcoming action...
This paper proposes a domain-general model for the functional contribution of ventral premotor cortex (PMv) and adjacent Broca's area to perceptual, cognitive, and motor processing. We propose to understand this frontal region as a highly flexible sequence processor, with the PMv mapping sequential events onto stored structural templates and Broca's Area involved in more complex, hierarchical or hypersequential...
In this position paper, we discuss a neural architecture comprising three major cortical systems: the inferior frontal cortex (including Broca's area), the rostral part of the posterior parietal cortex, and the superior temporal cortex. This network of areas is critical to imitation and to language. What are the functional properties of the network that make it possible for imitation and language...
This paper suggests that a cortical network comprising inferior frontolateral cortex [IFLC, corresponding to Brodmann's area (BA) 44], ventrolateral premotor cortex (vlPMC), and anterior superior temporal gyrus (aSTG) is involved in the processing of musical structure. This network presumably calculates harmonic relations between a chord and a preceding harmonic sequence, is involved in the detection...
The idea is put forward that Broca's area (BA 44/45) and the left ventral premotor cortex (BA 6) together with the frontal operculum support different functions during language processing. While BA 44/45 is seen to be increasingly activated whenever the internal re-construction of a hierarchical structure from a sequential input is necessary, BA 6 is involved in the processing of local structural...
This paper presents data and theoretical framework supporting a new interpretation of the role played by Broca's area. Recent brain imaging studies report that, in addition to speech-related activation, Broca's area is also significantly involved during tasks devoid of verbal content. In consideration of the large variety of experimental paradigms inducing Broca's activation, here we present some...
Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), this study directly examined an issue that bridges the potential language processing and multi-modal views of the role of Broca's area: the effects of task-demands in language comprehension studies. We presented syntactically simple and complex sentences for auditory comprehension under three different (differentially complex) task-demand conditions:...
The frontal cortex consists of numerous areas, each with a special architecture (cyto-, myelo-, receptorarchitecture, etc.), connectivity and function. Quantitative tools of the analysis may assist in defining these cortical areas, and their position in a hierarchy of cortical regions and subregions. They enable a reliable definition of areal borders, and the consideration of intersubject variability...
In addition to its projection to the brainstem, the ventral premotor cortex (PMv) sends axons directly to the upper cervical spinal cord in primates, with few terminations more caudally in either the cervical enlargement or in the lumbosacral spinal segments. This finding suggests that PMv plays a role in the control of head movements. Furthermore, comparative neuroanatomical studies indicate that...
Functional neuroimaging studies in normal subjects indicate that a region in the left frontal operculum (FO) is more active when subjects read pronounceable nonwords as compared to most word types. Here, we report convergent evidence on this finding using the lesion method. We tested the prediction that subjects with left FO damage would have impaired reading of pronounceable nonwords, but relatively...
In this paper we review evidence for frontal and parietal lobe involvement in sign language comprehension and production, and evaluate the extent to which these data can be interpreted within the context of a mirror neuron system for human action observation and execution. We present data from three literatures — aphasia, cortical stimulation, and functional neuroimaging. Generally, we find support...
Event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to investigate the determinants of blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) signal correlates of processing relative clauses. Matched pairs of sentences that differed in their processing demands were compared. One member of the pair consisted of a syntactically simpler object- subject (OS) sentence, containing a subject-relativized...
It is suggested that, rather than Broca's area playing its role in syntactic comprehension because its functions are a specialization those of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) or derived from sensori-motor functions of cortex from which it is evolutionarily descended, this region may be involved in this aspect of language because of its intrinsic neural organization.
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