Neural correlates of Dutch Verb Second in speech production Dirk-Bart den Ouden a,b, * , Hans Hoogduin a , Laurie A. Stowe a , Roelien Bastiaanse a a School of Behavioural and Cognitive Neurosciences, University of Groningen, The Netherlands b Aphasia & Neurolinguistics Research Laboratory, Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Northwestern University, USA Accepted 17 May 2007 Available online 19 June 2007 Abstract Dutch speakers with agrammatic Broca’s aphasia are known to have problems with the production of finite verbs in main clauses. This performance pattern has been accounted for in terms of the specific syntactic complexity of the Dutch main clause structure, which requires an extra syntactic operation (Verb Second), relative to the basic Subject–Object–Verb order surfacing in Dutch subordinate clauses. We report an fMRI study into the question whether this syntactic complexity is reflected in increased brain activation correlated with the production of Dutch main clause word order, in speakers without language impairment. Nineteen healthy subjects performed a covert sentence completion task, during which main and subordinate clauses were alternately elicited in a block design. Results show a left middle to superior frontal cluster of activation correlated to production of Verb-Second over Verb-Final clauses, with no activation in the opposite contrast. This activation pattern is counter to what might be expected from the frequency distribution of main and sub- ordinate clauses. We conclude that the Verb-Second deviation from the basic Dutch SOV word order costs extra neural resources and that this also underlies the agrammatic problems with the production of finite verbs in Dutch main clauses. Ó 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Syntactic movement; Verbs; Dutch; Neuroimaging; fMRI 1. Introduction Agrammatic Broca’s aphasia is characterized by gram- matical problems: sentence structures are simplified and both free and bound grammatical morphemes are omitted or substituted. The way the grammatical impairment is manifest is at least partially dependent on the language of the agrammatic speaker. In languages where grammati- cal relations are mainly expressed by bound morphemes (the so-called ‘agglutinative languages’, such as Finnish and Turkish), omission and substitutions of bound mor- phemes will be most prominent, whereas in languages where grammatical relations are mainly expressed by word order (such as English and Dutch) only simple sentences or ellipses will be used. Dutch agrammatic speakers have problems with finite verbs in main sentence clauses. In their spontaneous speech, they prefer ellipses with the infinitive in sentence- final position, instead of finite verbs in second position (Bastiaanse, Hugen, Kos, & Zonneveld, 2002). Also, they are better at producing object–finite verb sequences in sub- ordinate sentence clauses than finite verb–object sequences in main clauses (Bastiaanse & Thompson, 2003), despite the fact that the latter sequence is far more frequent in Dutch. The present study focuses on the neurological correlates of the differences between the high-frequent main clause and the low-frequent subordinate clause, by examining neural activity in healthy speakers of Dutch. First a brief linguistic background will be sketched, followed by a summary of experiments performed with Dutch agram- matic speakers, leading to the hypotheses of the present study, which is that production of the high-frequent main clause, compared to the low-frequent subordinate clause, is correlated with increased brain activation, specifically 0093-934X/$ - see front matter Ó 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.bandl.2007.05.001 * Corresponding author. Address: Aphasia & Neurolinguistics Research Laboratory, Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Northwestern University, USA. E-mail address: d-ouden@northwestern.edu (D.-B. den Ouden). www.elsevier.com/locate/b&l Available online at www.sciencedirect.com Brain and Language 104 (2008) 122–131