University of Southern California, USA.
J Cogn Neurosci. 2011 Jul;23(7):1664-80. doi: 10.1162/jocn.2010.21530. Epub 2010 Jul 9.
The role of Broca's area in sentence processing has been debated for the last 30 years. A central and still unresolved issue is whether Broca's area plays a specific role in some aspect of syntactic processing (e.g., syntactic movement, hierarchical structure building) or whether it serves a more general function on which sentence processing relies (e.g., working memory). This review examines the functional organization of Broca's area in regard to its contributions to sentence comprehension, verbal working memory, and other multimodal cognitive processes. We suggest that the data are consistent with the view that at least a portion of the contribution of Broca's area to sentence comprehension can be attributed to its role as a phonological short-term memory resource. Furthermore, our review leads us to conclude that there is no compelling evidence that there are sentence-specific processing regions within Broca's area.
布罗卡区在句子处理中的作用已经争论了 30 多年。一个核心且尚未解决的问题是，布罗卡区是否在句法处理的某些方面（例如句法移动、层次结构构建）发挥特定作用，还是它在句子处理所依赖的更一般功能（例如工作记忆）中发挥作用。本综述探讨了布罗卡区的功能组织，以及其对句子理解、言语工作记忆和其他多模态认知过程的贡献。我们认为，这些数据与以下观点一致，即布罗卡区对句子理解的贡献至少部分归因于其作为语音短期记忆资源的作用。此外，我们的综述使我们得出结论，没有令人信服的证据表明布罗卡区存在特定于句子的处理区域。
