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Electrophysiological Evidence for Sentence Comprehension - Wings

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grammatical knowledge, resembling procedural memory, requires years of learning and<br />

practicing. The DP model goes a step further: the same neural circuits that are involved in<br />

declarative and procedural memory are involved in lexical, i.e. grammatical processing:<br />

The brain structures that subserve declarative memory play analogous roles in<br />

lexical memory and … the brain system underlying procedural memory subserves<br />

the mental grammar (Ullman, 2004:245).<br />

The structures that are involved in the grammatical/procedural memory system are basal<br />

ganglia (in particular caudate nucleus), frontal cortex (Broca’s area and pre-motor<br />

regions) parietal cortex (supramarginal gyrus- BA 40) and possibly superior parietal<br />

lobule (BA 7), as well as superior temporal cortex, which is close related to the<br />

declarative memory system. In the grammatical/procedural system the cerebellum should<br />

also be included. Ullman includes medial temporal lobe into the lexical/declarative<br />

memory (encoding, consolidation), temporal and temporo-parietal areas (access and<br />

retrieval), as well as inferior and ventral temporal regions that are involving in non-<br />

linguistic conceptual knowledge. Superior temporal cortex plays a role in storing<br />

phonological representation. Both systems are strongly influenced by acetylcholine and<br />

estrogen (which also explains sex differences in language per<strong>for</strong>mance).<br />

Ullman briefly discusses electrophysiological evidence in favor of his model. He quotes<br />

the ERP literature in which N400 was elicited in tasks that could be interpreted as lexical<br />

processing, but also in tasks that are related to non-linguistic conceptual-semantic<br />

processing. In the same way, LAN and P600 could be obtained in experiments that are<br />

related to automatic computations in general and not only with linguistic stimuli that<br />

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