eight patients, the difference between nouns and verbs was no longer significant. In two patients, a paradoxical dissociation (V>N) emerged. Group analysis: performance on nouns and verbs across naming tasks (Figure 1) Patients named actions in the NVR-SC task better than in the picture naming task (58% correct versus 37%; p
Verb second in Dutch sentence production: an fMRI study D.B. den Ouden, Y.R.M. Bastiaanse, J.M. Hoogduin, R.P. Maguire & L.A. Stowe School <strong>of</strong> Behavioural and Cognitive Neurosciences, University <strong>of</strong> Groningen As reported by Bastiaanse et al. (2002), agrammatic speakers (Broca’s aphasia) have difficulty with the production <strong>of</strong> finite verbs in main clauses, in which these finite verbs are placed in the second constituent position in the sentence. This has been argued to result from (non)canonicity <strong>of</strong> word order, or more directly from the extra cost <strong>of</strong> a movement operation which derives the main clause word order from a more basic structure. In Dutch, the base position <strong>of</strong> verbs is argued to be sentence final (Koster, 1975). This ordering is maintained at surface level for nonfinite verbs, as in (1), and for finite verbs in embedded clauses, as in (2): 1) De jongen wil een boek lezen (lit.) The boy wants a book to read 2) Ik zie dat de jongen een boek leest (lit.) I see that the boy a book reads For Dutch main clauses, verbs move from this base position to the second position in the sentence (Den Besten, 1977), as in (3). 3) De jongen leest een boek (lit.) The boy reads a book We have conducted an fMRI study into production <strong>of</strong> Dutch main clause and embedded clause word order, thus capturing the neural correlates <strong>of</strong> ‘verb movement’ and the particular difficulty it poses for agrammatic speakers. We had two hypotheses about the results: 1) production <strong>of</strong> main clauses with finite verbs (verb second) will correlate with increased brain activation, relative to production <strong>of</strong> embedded clauses with finite verbs; and 2) this activation will show up in regions related to syntactic processing in other work, in particular Broca’s area (BA 44/45; see Caplan, 2001), a region traditionally claimed to be involved in agrammatic aphasia (Grodzinsky, 2000). 19 Healthy native speakers <strong>of</strong> Dutch performed sentence completion tasks, covertly, on the basis <strong>of</strong> pictures that they were shown, depicting transitive actions. In alternating blocks, verb-second (V2) main clauses (4a) were elicited after the cue Ik lach want ... [picture], while verb-final (Vf) embedded clauses (4b) were elicited after the cue Ik lach omdat ... [picture]. The two complementizers want and omdat both mean ‘because’, but they are subcategorized for different clause types, coordinate and subordinate, respectively. 4a) Ik lach want de jongen leest een boek (coordinate) (lit.) I’m laughing because the boy reads a book 4b) Ik lach omdat de jongen een boek leest (subordinate) (lit.) I’m laughing because the boy a book reads Scanning was carried out on a 1.5 T Siemens Vision scanner, with TR 3 seconds, slice thickness 3.5 mm and 38 slices/volume. A 30 second block consisted <strong>of</strong> 9 trials. Between blocks, a fixation point was shown for 30 seconds. Each participant performed 3 runs <strong>of</strong> 6 blocks per experimental condition. Data were normalized to a template from the Montreal Neurological Institute, based on 152 brains, and smoothed with a 10 mm filter. Preprocessing and statistical analyses were carried out with SPM99. Figure 1 shows the result <strong>of</strong> the subtraction <strong>of</strong> Vf activation from V2 activation, uncorrected for multiple comparisons (p < 0.001). There is increased brain activation in the verb-second condition, compared to the activation in the verb-final condition. By contrast, there are no brain areas that show more activation in the verb-final condition than in the verb-second condition. This confirms our hypothesis 1.
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