Dr. William Matchin gives guest lecture

The University of Georgia Department of Linguistics hosted Dr. William Matchin, Assistant Professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders at the University of South Carolina, for a guest lecture on March 6, 2020. The title of the presentation was "The cortical organization of syntax."

Abstract: Syntax, the structure of sentences, enables humans to express an infinite range of meanings through finite means. A prominent model of syntax in the brain proposes the localization of Merge to the posterior portion of Broca’s area, the pars opercularis (Friederici, 2017). I will demonstrate that this proposal is inadequate both empirically and conceptually, advocating for an alternative framework recently advanced by Matchin & Hickok (2019). Our framework attributes distinct contributions to two key regions strongly implicated in syntactic processes: hierarchical lexical-syntactic structure in the posterior superior temporal sulcus/middle temporal gyrus, and morpho-syntactic linearization in the anterior portion of Broca’s area, the pars triangularis. This model explains a variety of sentence comprehension and production deficits in aphasia, including the classic distinction between agrammatism (omission of functional elements and reduction of syntactic complexity) and paragrammatism (syntactic errors).