November 2002 Vol 3 No 11 | HIGHLIGHTS

Nature Reviews Neuroscience 3, 837 (2002); doi:10.1038/nrn973

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Selective priming of syntactic processing by event-related transcranial magnetic stimulation of Broca's area.
Sakai, K. L. et al. Neuron 35, 1177–1182 (2002) | PubMed |

Lesions of Broca's area cause aphasia, but it is not clear whether this effect is related to a syntactic or a semantic deficit. Sakai et al. used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to interfere transiently with the activity of Broca's area while subjects were required to judge whether a series of sentences were semantically or syntactically normal. They found that the effect of TMS was limited to syntactic decisions, highlighting the role of Broca's area in syntactic processing.

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