Sequential Processing of Lexical, Grammatical, and Phonological Information within Broca’s Area

By Ned T. Sahin, Steven Pinker, S. Cash, Donald L. Schomer, Eric Halgren. Science, 2009

416 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Seeing the Brain's One, Two, Three Taking advantage of the rare opportunity to record neuronal activity in the human brain using intracranial electrodes, Sahin et al. (p. 445; see the Perspective by Hagoort and Levelt) document the spatial and temporal pattern of neuronal populations within Broca's area as patients thought of a single word, changed its tense (for verbs) or number (for nouns), and articulated the word silently. For these three stages, they detected activity at 200, 320, and 450 milliseconds, moving in a caudal to rostral direction. These data fit neatly within the roughly 600 milliseconds required for the onset of speech and map the distinct neural computations within an area of the brain, known for almost a century and a half, as important for the production of language. Intracranial electrodes record activity in a language-associated area of the brain as words are identified and produced. Words, grammar, and phonology are linguistically distinct, yet their neural substrates are difficult to distinguish in macroscopic brain regions. We investigated whether they can be separated in time and space at the circuit level using intracranial electrophysiology (ICE), namely by recording local field potentials from populations of neurons using electrodes implanted in language-related brain regions while people read words verbatim or grammatically inflected them (present/past or singular/plural). Neighboring probes within Broca’s area revealed distinct neuronal activity for lexical (~200 milliseconds), grammatical (~320 milliseconds), and phonological (~450 milliseconds) processing, identically for nouns and verbs, in a region activated in the same patients and task in functional magnetic resonance imaging. This suggests that a linguistic processing sequence predicted on computational grounds is implemented in the brain in fine-grained spatiotemporally patterned activity.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental and Educational Psychology, Language and Linguistics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/39d2525f930678cba32f245fc89552c827f53134

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Citations in the corpus

Consequences of the Now-or-Never bottleneck for signed versus spoken languages (2015, neutral): “Data from intracranial recordings during language production are consistent with different temporal windows for chunk decoding at the word, morphemic, and phonological levels, separated by just over a tenth of a second (Sahin et al. 2009).”
Motor movement matters: The flexible abstractness of inner speech (2010, neutral): “In fact, for decades, cognitive neuroscientists have been sufficiently convinced of the correspondence between inner and overt speech that they regularly used inner speech as a proxy for overt speech in neuroimaging tasks (e.g., Sahin, Pinker, Cash, Schomer, & Halgren, 2009; Thompson-Schill, D’Esp”
Evidence for potentials and limitations of brain plasticity using an atlas of functional resectability of WHO grade II gliomas: Towards a "minimal common brain" (2011, background): “…just in front of the non-resectable ventral premotor cortex, one can hypothesize that the realmotor area for speech output is the vPMC rather than Broca's area, the latter being probably involved in other components of language (like syntactic and phonological processes) (Sahin et al., 2009).”
The cortical dynamics of speaking: present shortcomings and future avenues (2016, background): “…(e.g. Graves et al., 2007; Graves, Grabowski, Mehta, & Gupta, 2008; Hickok, 2012, 2014a; Wilson et al., 2009), and IFG activity to (motor) phonology and syllabification specifically (e.g. Papoutsi et al., 2009; Sahin et al., 2009; Schuhmann et al., 2012; Schuhmann, Schiller, Goebel, & Sack, 2009).”
The Phonological Loop (2010, neutral): “…(lexical) to lower levels (articulatory) has been demonstrated in Broca’s area during the first 450 milliseconds of a language-production task (Sahin et al. 2009), but this does not exclude the possibility of feedback operations in later stages (Hagoort and Levelt 2009) or persistent…”
The brain basis of language processing: from structure to function. (2011, background): “The IFG, in particular Broca’s area, has long been known to support language production (28, 223) and comprehension processes (269).”