Consider the following excerpt from a monograph on cognitive neurobiology:
"While early twentieth-century neurobiologists posited that human speech perception relies exclusively on auditory cortex processing of acoustic frequencies, recent neuroimaging reveals that motor cortex activation occurs synchronously during phoneme recognition—not as a secondary reflective response, but as an integral component required to parse ambiguous acoustic inputs under noisy ambient conditions."
Statement: Based on the excerpt, it can be validly inferred that motor cortex activation during phoneme recognition is entirely absent when acoustic inputs are unambiguous and ambient noise is absent.
Answer: Answer
Answer
The statement is False. The target sentence indicates that motor cortex activation is necessary for parsing ambiguous acoustic inputs in noisy conditions, but it makes no claim regarding whether motor cortex activation is present or absent under quiet or clear conditions.
The statement is false because GMAT reading comprehension inference questions demand strict logical deduction. The source sentence establishes that motor cortex activation is an essential component for parsing ambiguous inputs in noisy environments; however, it nowhere asserts or implies that motor activation disappears in noise-free environments. Assuming the negation of a condition's outcome when the condition is removed is a classic unwarranted extrapolation trap.
Step-by-Step Solution
Key Concept
Single-Sentence Inferences and Avoiding Unwarranted Extrapolation
Estimated Time:2m 0s