As we listen casually to sentences during conversation or while we watch TV, our brains carry out highly complex computations on the incoming signal. Central among these is high-speed syntactic analysis which we do rather effortlessly. Linguists study the nature of these computations; neurolinguists investigate their neural implementation. How language mechanisms might be organized in the brain, what counts as relevant evidence, and how it is adduced, and what its implications are will be the topic of this talk. It will be about what we know about the organization of syntax in the brain, and how we came to know it.

I will start with a quick tutorial for the uninitiated, and present some theoretical considerations that motivate certain syntactic principles. I will then present evidence regarding their neurological instantiation. Among these will be (i) syntactic movement (a k a grammatical transformations: the dancer picked the purple rose => which rose did the dancer pick), and (ii) principles that regulate the way certain referentially dependent elements fix their reference in a sentence (a k a binding, as in the dancer looked at herself in the mirror). I will discuss recent studies of these rule systems in healthy adults, carried out through fMRI tests of receptive syntax, and show two things: first, different applications of syntactic movement (e.g., questions, topicalization) activate similar cerebral loci (mostly in the left inferior frontal gyrus [Broca's region], and in both temporal lobes [Wernicke's region]); second, binding relations (as above) surprisingly activate areas in the frontal lobe of the right cerebral hemisphere.

Letting the audience catch their breath, I will then move to the second part of the talk, where these results will be juxtaposed to lesion data from behavioral and anatomical investigations of Broca's aphasic patients (usually subsequent to left-hemispheric stroke). When looked at superficially, the picture that arises from comprehension studies in aphasia is not pretty: it presents seemingly unruly, sometimes strange, patterns; further puzzles appear when cross-linguistic differences are thrown into the pot (e.g., aberrant comprehension performances of aphasic speakers of German/Dutch vs. Spanish, Chinese vs. English, or Italian vs. Hebrew). I will propose solutions to some of these puzzles, and try to justify a unified account, that suggests high regularity in impairment patterns in aphasia, and that also extends to available fMRI results from sentence processing experiments.

Finally, I will try to convince the audience that this relatively rich array of results has implications to (at least) three research domains: Linguistically, syntactic modularity will be shown to have neurological reflexes, which should lead us – or so I would suggest – to new ideas about the relevance of neurology to linguistic theory; Cognitively, the fact that both movement and binding are dependency relations that tax working memory, but are localized in distinct cerebral loci, should lead to a more refined view of the part of working memory thought to reside in, perhaps around, Broca’s region; neurologically, these results might lead to a fairly radical revision of our beliefs about the way language is localized in cortex.

Relevant reading (available in http://freud.tau.ac.il/~yosef1 ):
Grodzinsky, Yosef. 2000. The neurology of syntax: language use without Broca’s area. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 23.1., 1-71.

Grodzinsky, Yosef. In press. A blueprint for a brain map of syntax. In Grodzinsky, Y. and K. Amunts, eds., Broca’s Region. New York: Oxford University Press.