Broca's area
For a long time, it was assumed that the role of Broca's area was more devoted to language production than language comprehension. However, there is evidence to demonstrate that Broca's area also plays a significant role in language comprehension. Patients with lesions in Broca's area who exhibit agrammatical speech production also show inability to use syntactic information to determine the meaning of sentences. Also, a number of neuroimaging studies have implicated an involvement of Broca's area, particularly of the pars opercularis of the left inferior frontal gyrus, during the processing of complex sentences. Further, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments have shown that highly ambiguous sentences result in a more activated inferior frontal gyrus. Therefore, the activity level in the inferior frontal gyrus and the level of lexical ambiguity are directly proportional to each other, because of the increased retrieval demands associated with highly ambiguous content.