Citation:

Cereb Cortex. 2005 Aug;15(8):1261-9. Epub 2005 Jan 5. 

The neural mechanisms of speech comprehension: fMRI studies of semantic ambiguity.

Rodd JM, Davis MH, Johnsrude IS.

Department of Psychology, University College London, UK. j.rodd@ucl.ac.uk

A number of regions of the temporal and frontal lobes are known to be important for spoken language comprehension, yet we do not have a clear understanding of their functional role(s). In particular, there is considerable disagreement about which brain regions are involved in the semantic aspects of comprehension. Two functional magnetic resonance studies use the phenomenon of semantic ambiguity to identify regions within the fronto-temporal language network that subserve the semantic aspects of spoken language comprehension. Volunteers heard sentences containing ambiguous words (e.g. ‘the shell was fired towards the tank’) and well-matched low-ambiguity sentences (e.g. ‘her secrets were written in her diary’). Although these sentences have similar acoustic, phonological, syntactic and prosodic properties (and were rated as being equally natural), the high-ambiguity sentences require additional processing by those brain regions involved in activating and selecting contextually appropriate word meanings. The ambiguity in these sentences goes largely unnoticed, and yet high-ambiguity sentences produced increased signal in left posterior inferior temporal cortex and inferior frontal gyri bilaterally. Given the ubiquity of semantic ambiguity, we conclude that these brain regions form an important part of the network that is involved in computing the meaning of spoken sentences. (My emphasis.)

 

Here we may have a possible biological locus for exactly the sort of phenomenon I was positing in my previous post. Interestingly enough, ambiguity seems to a core process, and again we have evidence that language users are able to actively engage with ambiguous language and that an important step in cognition is pre-disambiguated. Importantly, it is in all likelihood that linguistic comprehension engages in parallel visualization of multiple possibilities. This is probably responsible for so much of what makes poetry interesting and road signs uninteresting.

The inferior temporal cortex is a higher-level part of the ventral stream of the visual processing system of the human brain. The ventral stream engages in classification and identification of phenomena. The adjacent inferior frontal gyrus coontains Broadmans Areas 44 and 45, which contain a number of non-visual areas heavily engaged in linguistic understanding. Broca’s Area is contained in Broadmans Area 44. Broca’s area is connected to Wernicke’s area via the arculate fasciculus.

One way to disprove my present theory is to see the neural precursors to these differentiated brain areas in fetal development. Do human brains develop the visual system first? Do these linguistic areas develop out of the visual tissues? Or do they come out of a wholly different set of neural tissues? Anyone know a neuroembryologist?

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