Electrophysiological Evidence for Sentence Comprehension - Wings

convolution) in semantic condition. Stronger activations in syntactic conditions were
found in BA 22, 38, 39 and 40 as well (in the left temporal and parietal lobe, Wernike’s
area, superior temporal gyrus, angular and supramarginal gyrus). These differences
corroborate dissociation between syntactic and semantic processing in language
comprehension.
1.2. Modeling Sentence Comprehension
Model building has been the major conceptual tool for understanding the processes that
take part in sentence comprehension. Models are, roughly, more elaborate hypotheses
about these processes. In cognitive psychology they are a logical consequence of a view
that cognitive processes can be understood as computations or information processing;
therefore, language comprehension, production, reading or writing are usually
represented as a flow chart.
There are two basic motivations for constructing sentence comprehension models; one
originates from linguistics (or psycholinguistics) and the other from neurology. The first
came along the formulation of generative grammar and the idea that linguistic theory
should explain the linguistic knowledge of the speaker. Although Chomsky opposed the
idea that language performance could tell us something about language competence,
psycholinguistics profited a great deal from the opportunity to test the psychological
implications of a linguistic theory. On the other hand, various types of aphasia motivated
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