Abstract
Inui, Ogawa, and Ohba (2007) showed that the left inferior frontal gyrus (BA47) is involved in thematic role processing of Japanese particles. Here event-related fMRI was used to investigate the neural basis of syntactic processing of Japanese sentences. The stimuli were 4 nouns, 3 particles, and 4 verbs. Noun, particle and verb were presented sequentially as a sentence to subjects. In the grammatical condition, subjects were instructed to judge whether the sentence is grammatically and semantically correct or not. In the phonological condition, subjects judged whether the particle shared a vowel sound with the first syllable of the verb. We found that the left BA47 and the left angular gyrus were activated when a particle was presented and that Broca's area and the left premotor area were activated when a verb was presented in the grammatical condition. We will discuss the neural basis of syntactic processing of simple sentences.
