Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

Do the syntactic structures proposed by many linguistics analyses
correspond to actual, neurally encoded, data structures during
sentence comprehension? In the first part of the talk, I will present
our attempts to address this issue through a series of functional
magnetic resonance imaging experiments relying on a variety of
experimental paradigms (syntactic priming, manipulation of syntactic
coherence, sentence verification, ...). In the second part, I will
describe some incursions in the domains of Music and Mathematics where
objects (e.g. melodies on the one hand, arithmetic formulas or number
names on the other hand) arguably possess some syntactic structure.
The results of experiments manipulating syntactic coherence with these
types of stimuli reveal some interesting similarities and
discrepancies with natural language.