Because of the fundamental nature of this computation, called merge in theoretical linguistics ( Chomsky, 1999 Adger, 2003), the determination of its neural implementation would constitute the neurobiological basis of a process which is at the root of any complex syntactic structure ( Berwick et al., 2013). Recently, it has been claimed, however, that the human capacity to process complex syntactic structures is based on a very basic binary process which syntactically binds words together hierarchically to form larger structures. Traditionally language is thought of as one of the most complex cognitive functions. Neurocomputationally, they support the idea of invariance within BA 44 in the location of activation across participants for basic syntactic building processing. Neuroanatomically, the present results call for a redefinition of BA 44 as a region with internal functional specializations. Crucially, the functional activity of syntactic binding was confined to one out of five clusters proposed by a recent fine-grained sub-anatomical parcellation for BA 44, with consistency across individuals. Our results showed that syntactic phrases-compared to word-list sequences-corresponded to increased neural activity in the ventral-anterior portion of the left pars opercularis, whereas the adjacently located deep frontal operculum/anterior insula (FOP/aINS), a phylogenetically older and less specialized region, was found to be equally active for both conditions. In the present sub-region based functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study we directly assessed the neuroanatomical nature of this process. So far, the neural implementation of this basic operation has only been inferred indirectly from studies investigating more complex linguistic phenomena. Here we break down complexity of language to its most basic syntactic computation which hierarchically binds single words together to form larger phrases and sentences. Language is thought to represent one of the most complex cognitive functions in humans. 2Berlin School of Mind and Brain, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany.1Department of Neuropsychology, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany.
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