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Science 16 October 2009:
Vol. 326. no. 5951, pp. 445 - 449
DOI: 10.1126/science.1174481
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Reports

Sequential Processing of Lexical, Grammatical, and Phonological Information Within Broca’s Area

Ned T. Sahin,1,2,* Steven Pinker,2 Sydney S. Cash,3 Donald Schomer,4 Eric Halgren1

Words, grammar, and phonology are linguistically distinct, yet their neural substrates are difficult to distinguish in macroscopic brain regions. We investigated whether they can be separated in time and space at the circuit level using intracranial electrophysiology (ICE), namely by recording local field potentials from populations of neurons using electrodes implanted in language-related brain regions while people read words verbatim or grammatically inflected them (present/past or singular/plural). Neighboring probes within Broca’s area revealed distinct neuronal activity for lexical (~200 milliseconds), grammatical (~320 milliseconds), and phonological (~450 milliseconds) processing, identically for nouns and verbs, in a region activated in the same patients and task in functional magnetic resonance imaging. This suggests that a linguistic processing sequence predicted on computational grounds is implemented in the brain in fine-grained spatiotemporally patterned activity.

1 Department of Radiology, University of California–San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92037, USA.
2 Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
3 Department of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA 02114, USA.
4 Department of Neurology, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, MA 02215, USA.

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: sahin{at}post.harvard.edu

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THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN CITED BY OTHER ARTICLES:
The Speaking Brain.
P. Hagoort and W. J. M. Levelt (2009)
Science 326, 372-373
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