The pattern of results suggests that the activation of lexical information in PMTG was sensitive to contextual disambiguating information and that processing context-dependent meanings may involve interactions between frontal and posterior areas. Critically, ambiguous words also elicited more activity in to-contexts than the-contexts in PMTG and LIFG, suggesting that contextual integration strengthened the action meaning in both areas. Ambiguous words elicited more activity than low-ambiguity controls in LIFG and various meaning-related areas such as PMTG.

Ambiguous words such as bowl were presented in minimal disambiguating contexts indicating object ( the bowl) or action ( to bowl) meanings, and were compared to low-ambiguity controls. Our fMRI data indicate that brain activity in an area sensitive to motion and action semantics – the posterior middle temporal gyrus (PMTG) – is modulated by a word's syntactic context. Current semantic processing theories suggest that word meanings are retrieved from diverse cortical regions storing sensory-motor and other types of semantic information, and are further integrated with context in left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG). This study investigated the neural mechanisms involved in computing word meanings that change as a function of syntactic context. The meaning of a word usually depends on the context in which it occurs.

Another word for running list