Cortical networks responsive to phrase structure and subject island violations
In principle, functional neuroimaging provides uniquely informative data in addressing linguistic questions, because it can indicate distinct processes that are not apparent from behavioral data alone. This could involve adjudicating the source of unacceptability via the different patterns of elicited brain responses to different ungrammatical sentence types. However, it is difficult to interpret brain activations to syntactic violations. Such responses could reflect processes that have nothing intrinsically related to linguistic representations, such as domain-general executive function abilities. In order to facilitate the potential use of functional neuroimaging methods to identify the source of different syntactic violations, we conducted an fMRI experiment to identify the brain activation maps associated with two distinct syntactic violation types: phrase structure (created by inverting the order of two adjacent words within a sentence) and subject islands (created by extracting a