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Abstract:
Abstract: The observation that tongue-twisters take longer to
silently read than normal text has been used to argue for a role of
phonology in skilled reading comprehension. The present study used
functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the
distribution of cortical patterns of activation related to the
tongue-twister effect in a sentence comprehension task. We compared
the amount of fMRI-measured activation in a task in which
right-handed native English speakers silently read tongue-twister
sentences and in a task in which they silently read control
sentences equated for lexical frequency and syntactic complexity.
The participants took longer to read the tongue-twister sentences
and were less accurate in answering comprehension questions about
these sentences. In addition, the tongue-twister sentences resulted
in an increase in the amount of fMRI-measured activation in a
network of cortical regions that included both the left inferior
frontal gyrus (Broca's Area), the right inferior frontal gyrus, and
the left inferior parietal lobule. In contrast, activation in other
areas thought to be involved in lexical access and other aspects of
working memory was not modulated by phonological similarity. The
results are consistent with the suggestion that the inferior
frontal gyrus and the inferior parietal lobule collaborate to
function as a phonological loop for the maintenance of verbal
information.
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