Electrophysiological Evidence for Sentence Comprehension - Wings

information on-line. Finding the notion of Broca’s area, traditional language area, ‘ill-
defined’ and finding no reason ‘to treat Broca’s area as a natural kind’ (Hagoort,
2005:419), Hagoort emphasizes the importance of the granular cortex that comprises of
BA44 and BA47 that is involved in heteromodal processing. Unlike them, BA45 is a part
of the Broca’s area that is not granular. Hagoort concludes that it therefore makes sense
to treat the left inferior frontal gyrus as the brain area in which the unification processes
can take place (i.e. processes that do not depend on the input system, but are genuinely
linguistic). It can hold on-line lexical information stored in the left temporal lobe and
integrate them into representations of multi-word utterances. This lexical storage is the
memory component in MUC. The role of the control component is a liaison to the
communicative intentions or actions of the speaker (or listener). It accounts for the
attentional control, turn taking or choice of a sociolect, for example. It is located in the
anterior cingular cortex and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.
Combining psycholinguistic model of sentence comprehension developed by Vosse and
Kempen with neuroimaging studies and trying to establish relations between the elements
of the psycholinguistic model and the function of the identified brain areas has an
obvious advantage over the ‘syntax-first’ models in which elements of psycholinguistic
models are just mapped onto the data obtained in electrophysiological recordings or brain
imaging. Memory in MUC corresponds to lexical storage and retrieval; unification in
MUC corresponds to the integration of the lexical information into multi-word
representation while control corresponds to the pragmatic information contained in the
linguistic message. In other words, the model dissolves language comprehension process
39