The neurobiology of sentence production: A narrative review and meta-analysis

Abstract

Although there is a sizeable body of literature on sentence comprehension and processing both in healthy and disordered language users, the literature on sentence production remains much more sparse. Linguistic and computational descriptions of expressive syntactic deficits in aphasia are especially rare. In addition, the neuroimaging and (psycho) linguistic literatures operate largely separately. In this paper, I will first lay out the theoretical lay of the land with regard to psycholinguistic models of sentence production. I will then provide a brief narrative overview and large-scale meta-analysis of the neuroimaging literature as it pertains to syntactic computation, followed by an attempt to integrate the psycholinguistic models with the findings from functional and clinical neuroimaging. Finally, I provide a brief overview of the literature surrounding expressive syntactic deficits and propose a path forward to close some of the existing gaps.