Distributional factors in language processing: evidence from parametric and naturalistic functional MRI

Language is a distinctive human ability that supports our daily life interactions. A deep understanding of the brain mechanisms behind language processing is fundamental to create physiological models and find possible alterations derived from specific pathologies. In the last decades, the general technological advancement and the development of more precise and less invasive investigation techniques have increased dramatically our knowledge of the neural correlates of language processing. However, the great variety of human languages, the possibility to communicate across multiple and different channels and the uncertainty about the actual role of some linguistic features leave several open questions with a concrete possibility of neuroscientific innovation. For instance, the features of a highly inflected language like Italian can provide interesting research questions and additional insights on how our brain processes linguistic information. The main aim of this work is to explore in greater details the influence of the linguistic distributional factors on the neural correlates of both language production and comprehension by exploiting the richness of the Italian language. Therefore, three functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments were performed by using both classical parametric and novel naturalistic frameworks. Two fast event-related fMRI experiments investigated the influence of the language distributional factors on the neural correlates of the inflectional process, whereas a third experiment was dedicated to providing additional insights on the linguistic prediction mechanism during natural language comprehension by modelling the neural response with two statistical language models. .. [edited by Author]