摘要：During sentence comprehension, earlier information must often be linked with later information across some potentially interfering intervening material. For example, for the sentence “The client who had implied that the visitor was important was complaining,” “client” has to be retrieved as the subject of “was complaining” across the embedded clause which includes another subject noun (“visitor”) that is a plausible agent of “complaining.” Interference occurs when the intervening material partially matches the retrieval cues generated by the verb based on semantic and/or syntactic features (Van Dyke, 2007). Such an approach can explain a wide range of sentence processing results, such as the greater difficulty of passive than active sentences and of object than subject relative clauses. In the present study we examined the brain regions involved in resolving interference using fMRI. Previous findings suggest a role for the left inferior frontal gyms (LIFG) in resolving semantic interference (Kan & Thompson-Schill, 2004) and we wished to determine if a similar or different region would be engaged in resolving syntactic interference.
