Independent syntactic representation identified in left front-temporal cortex during Chinese sentence comprehension

It has been well established that syntactic representation is independent of semantic representation in Indo-European languages, but it is unclear whether this is the case in Chinese. The present functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study adopted a syntactic priming paradigm to investigate the neural basis of Chinese syntactic representation. A passive sentence was preceded by either a passive or an active sentence without repeating a verb or a pattern of agent-patient animacy, thus constructing primed and unprimed sentence pairs based on sentence structure. The fMRI data were collected from 22 native Chinese speakers while they were reading the sentences. Priming-related activation suppression was found in the left temporal pole, left inferior frontal gyrus and left precentral gyrus. The results are the strongest neuroimaging evidence to date that syntactic representation is independent of semantic representation in Chinese, in line with Indo-European languages.