Matchin, Brodbeck, Hammerly & Lau

"The temporal dynamics of structure and content in sentence comprehension: Evidence from fMRI-constrained MEG," by an all-star crew of neuroterps.

Now in Human Brain Mapping, The temporal dynamics of structure and content in sentence comprehension: Evidence from fMRI-constrained MEG, by an all-star crew of neuroterps: former postdoc and current professor at South Carolina William Matchin, current postdoc Christian Brodbeck, former Baggett and current PhD student at UMass Chris Hammerly, and Ellen Lau. The paper reports MEG evidence supporting the conjecture, based on prior studies using fMRI, that the posterior temporal lobe (PTL) plays an important role in lexicalized syntactic processing, while the anterior temporal lobe (ATL) and anterior inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), regions traditionally associated with syntax, showed minimal effects of sentence structure. The results also indicated that ATL, PTL and IFG all showed effects of semantic content, in that they showed increased activation for real words relative to nonwords.