David Caplan

TL;DR: Experimental results from normal subjects and patients with various brain lesions converge on the conclusion that there is a specialization in the verbal working memory system for assigning the syntactic structure of a sentence and using that structure in determining sentence meaning that is separate from theWorking memory system underlying the use of sentence meaning to accomplish other functions.

TL;DR: The authors used PET to determine regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) when eight normal right-handed males read and made acceptability judgments about sentences and found that rCBF was greater in Broca's area (particularly in the pars opercularis) when subjects judged the semantic plausibility of syntactically more complex sentences as compared to less complex sentences.

TL;DR: The traditional teaching that the cerebellum is purely a motor control device no longer appears valid, if, indeed, ever it was, and there is increasing recognition that it contributes to cognitive processing and emotional control in addition to its role in motor coordination.

TL;DR: A qualitative neural distinction is suggested in processing these two types of conceptual anomalies within simple, unambiguous English sentences: thematic role animacy violations and non-thematic role pragmatic violations.

TL;DR: The results suggest that sentence span tasks are unreliable unless measurements are made of both their sentence processing and recall components, and that the predictive value of these tasks for reading comprehension abilities lies in the overlap of operations rather than in limitations in verbal working memory that apply to both.