Distinct cortical patches for syntactic and semantic composition in the human brain

Abstract

Although the brain areas for language processing are well delimited, whether lexical-semantic and syntactic processes are spatially segregated remains debated. To clarify this issue, we conducted two experiments using 7-Tesla functional MRI in 20 participants performing: a functional localizer involving reading sequences of words of increasing linguistic complexity; and a presentation of short, semantically impoverished three-word mini-sentences, flashed in a single glance (e.g., "he does it"), whose grammaticality and syntactic complexity was manipulated through syntactic movement. Our results reveal two functionally dissociable sets of cortical patches within the language system: one sensitive to syntactic structure even in the absence of meaning, and the other involved in semantic composition. This dual-network architecture was consistently observed in the majority of participants, although its precise anatomical localization varied. The two types of voxels coexisted even within a given brain region of the Glasser atlas. Results were confirmed using subject-specific analyses and region-by-condition interactions, as voxels in those two systems displayed markedly different responses to mini-sentences. Thus, high-resolution functional imaging reveals a division of labor between syntactic and semantic composition within the classical language network.