Language
How the Brain Handles Sentences with Multiple Meanings
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Resolving sentences with ambiguous quantifiers depends not just on core language areas but also on executive-control brain networks like the prefrontal cortex.
Key findings
Healthy young adults took an average of 93 milliseconds longer to process ambiguous sentences compared to unambiguous ones, activating both core language areas and prefrontal executive regions. Healthy seniors also showed a clear processing cost, taking an average of 393 milliseconds longer on ambiguous trials, whereas patients with bvFTD showed no such processing cost. Within the patient group, greater tissue loss in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex strongly correlated (r = -0.68) with slower response times for ambiguous sentences.
Methodology
In the initial experiment, researchers used fMRI to scan 16 healthy young adults while they judged whether sentences with ambiguous quantifiers matched a series of pictures. In the subsequent experiment, they tested 16 patients with a neurodegenerative disease called behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) and 16 healthy seniors using the same task. Additionally, 11 of the patients underwent brain imaging to correlate their gray matter density with their behavioral response times.
Limitations
The study does not rule out whether the prefrontal activity is specific to language ambiguity or represents general working memory and decision-making demands. Additionally, because the researchers did not test patients with parietal lobe disease, they could not verify the exact causal role of the parietal lobe activation seen in healthy adults. Finally, the findings are limited by relatively small sample sizes, particularly the subset of only 11 patients who had neuroimaging data available.
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