BCS261 Notes on Friederici (2012)

Goals: to identify the neural connections from perception to comprehension

How do researchers identify the pathways and connections? Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI)

Measures the diffusion of water molecules in the brain

Dynamic Causal Modeling (DCM): to find the connections by modeling the causal relationship between regions. According to Marreiros et al. (2010), “DCM was developed for (and applied principally to) estimating coupling among brain regions and how that coupling is influenced by experimental changes (e.g., time or context).”

The pathways from auditory perception to comprehensiono What needs to be done to understand a sentence

Low-level processing of the auditory input (primary auditory cortex, BA41/42, part of STG)

Acoustic input Phonetics Phonology (left STG, anterior to Heschl’s gyrus)

Word recognition (bilateral aSTG) Syntactic and semantic specification of words (aSTG) Parsing of syntactic structure (aSTG, BA44, and posterior BA45) Comprehension (lexical-semantic parsing): middle temporal gyrus (MTG),

BA47 and anterior BA45 (connected via extreme capsule from temporal)

Traditional view of the pathways:o Dorsal: auditory to motor mappingo Ventral: auditory to meaning

New evidence for the pathways o Dorsal:

Temporal cortex inferior parietal cortex Premotor cortex Temporal cortex Arcuate Fasciculus Broca’s area

o Ventral Ventral inferior frontal cortex (~BA47) Uncinate Fasciculus Temporal

pole

Inferior frontal cortex Extreme capsule Temporal cortex Occipital cortex