http://www.nitrc.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=4396 <table border="0" width="100%"><tr><td align="left"/></tr></table> <p><b>A structural distance effect for backward anaphora in Broca's area: An fMRI study.</b></p> <p>Brain Lang. 2014 Sep 24;138C:1-11</p> <p>Authors: Matchin W, Sprouse J, Hickok G</p> <p>Abstract<br/> Accounts of the role of Broca's area in sentence comprehension range from specific syntactic operations to domain-general processes. The present study was designed to tease apart these two general accounts by measuring the BOLD response to two syntactically distinct long-distance dependencies that invoke abstractly similar predictive processes: backward anaphora and filler-gap dependencies. Previous research has observed distance effects in Broca's area for filler-gap dependencies, but not canonical anaphora, which has been interpreted in support of a syntactic movement account. However, filler-gap dependencies engage predictive mechanisms, resulting in active search for the gap, while canonical anaphora do not. Backward anaphora correct for this asymmetry as they engage a predictive mechanism that parallels the active search in filler-gap dependencies. The results revealed a distance effect in the pars triangularis of Broca's area for the backward anaphora condition, supporting a prediction-based role for this region rather than one for a particular syntactic operation.<br/> </p><p>PMID: 25261745 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]</p> en-us Copyright 2000-2026 NITRC OSI Fri, 01 May 2026 11:29:55 GMT http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss NITRC RSS generator