Neural Correlates of Processing Syntax in Music and ... - PubMan

Language Perception 63
lary size were linked by a continuous and accelerating function (Bates & Goodman,
1997). The size of verb vocabulary was concurrently related to the number of reported
over-regularizations, an indicator for the acquisition of grammatical morphology
(Marchman & Bates, 1994).
Language is a form of communication, a tool that we use to accomplish certain social
ends. Children are immersed in communicative interaction with others from infancy, but
there are many skills that take years to develop. For example, coordinating reference
across speaker and listener roles involves manipulating and understanding given and
new information, deictic and anaphoric pronouns, temporal information, and so on.
During development, children gradually become able to consciously reflect on language,
to correct their own and others’ utterances, and to notice features of language at
all levels. Karmiloff-Smith (1992) proposes a developmental progression with an early
period of language learning followed by a period of skill automatization: Children have
to learn the forms of the language and to use them relatively effortlessly. Once language
becomes relatively fluent and automatic, it can become an object of reflection.
5.2 Language processing
In the current section three main issues will be discussed. Firstly, a brief overview of
(mainly linguistic) accounts to syntactic processing will be given. The second part introduces
a model to describe particular stages of syntactic processing and the brain
correlates of these steps. In the third part the function of two brain regions that are involved
in language processing, specifically in the processing of linguistic syntax, will
be discussed.
Processing syntactic structures
Syntactic information is, among other types of information, used, to determine the
meaning of a sentence. Syntactic processes include: [1] Structure building (combining
words into larger units on the basis of word category information and grammar rules);
[2] checking agreement (i.e. for inflectional features that establish a relationship, e.g.,
between verb and noun); [3] mapping thematic roles (such as agent and patient) onto
certain positions in the sentence; and [4] complexity (e.g., dealing with non-canonical
word order).