This study investigates neural correlates of L2 sentence comprehension, focusing on a particular syntactic operation of Korean scrambling and using a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). Korean scrambled sentences known to undergo syntactic movement are presented to native English speakers who are highly proficient in L2 Korean in a visual comprehension task and compared to carefully matched control sentences. I found that scrambled sentences as compared with canonical sentences elicited increased activation in the left inferior frontal gyrus(or Broca’s area) and dorsal prefrontal cortex, which was consistent with a previous study utilizing a native Japanese visual comprehension task. This finding suggests that increased proficiency leads to native-like syntactic processing.
1. Introduction
2. Methodology
3. Results
4. Discussion
5. Conclusion
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