Article

Although there is strong evidence that Broca's area is important for syntax, this
may simply be a by-product of greater working memory and/or cognitive control
demands for more complex syntactic structures. Here we report an experiment with
event-related transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to investigate whether
Broca's area plays a causal role in morphosyntactic processing when both working
memory and cognitive control demands are low. Participants were presented with
word pairs that could either agree or disagree in grammatical number or gender
while receiving stimulation to Broca's area or to the right intraparietal sulcus
(a control site). Stimulation of Broca's area significantly reduced the advantage
for grammatical relative to ungrammatical word pairs. In contrast, stimulation of
control site left this grammaticality advantage unchanged. The interaction
between grammaticality and stimulation was specific to Broca's area, suggesting a
clear involvement of the region in morphosyntactic processing.
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