Sixteen subjects made plausibility judgments regarding auditorily presented
cleft object and cleft subject sentences (It was the actress that the awar
d thrilled; It was the award that thrilled the actress). rCBF increased in
Broca's area, pars triangularis, when subjects processed the syntactically
more complex cleft object sentences. The results are consistent with previo
us experiments using written materials and suggest that an increase in rCBF
in Broca's area is associated with processing syntactically more complex s
entences, (C) 1999 Academic Press.