Lack of selectivity for syntax relative to word meanings throughout the language network
Lack of selectivity for syntax relative to word meanings throughout the language network
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DOI：
10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104348
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发表时间：
2020-10-01
期刊：
影响因子：
3.4
通讯作者：
Mineroff, Zachary
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Fedorenko, Evelina;Blank, Idan Asher;Mineroff, Zachary
为了理解你现在阅读的内容，你的大脑从语言知识库中检索单词和结构的含义（词汇语义处理），并识别它们之间的关系以构建复杂的含义（句法或组合处理）。这两套进程是依赖于不同的专门机制，还是共享一个共同的资源库？语言理论、语言习得和处理的经验证据以及计算模型共同描绘了一幅图景，即词汇语义和句法处理是紧密相连的，也许是不可分割的。相比之下，许多目前的语言的神经结构的建议继续赞同这样一种观点，即某些大脑区域选择性地支持句法/组合处理，虽然这种“句法枢纽”的轨迹，及其性质，不同的建议。在这里，我们使用一种强大的个体-被试fMRI方法，在三种句子理解范式中寻找句法对词汇-语义加工的选择性，这三种范式在以前的工作中已经被用来论证这种选择性：对词汇-语义与形态-句法违反的反应（实验1）;从神经抑制中恢复到仅在词汇项目与仅句法结构上不同的句子对（实验2）;和相同/不同的意义判断这样的句子对（实验3）。在整个实验中，词汇语义和句法条件引起了整个左额颞语言网络的强大的反应。然而，关键的是，没有哪个区域比词汇语义加工更强烈地参与句法加工，尽管有些区域表现出相反的模式。因此，contra许多目前的建议的神经架构的语言，句法/组合处理是不可分离的词汇语义处理在大脑区域的水平，甚至体素子集的语言网络内，在这两个过程之间的强烈整合，一直观察到在行为和计算语言研究。研究结果进一步表明，语言网络通常更关注意义而不是句法形式，这与语言的主要功能--在头脑中分享意义是一致的。
To understand what you are reading now, your mind retrieves the meanings of words and constructions from a linguistic knowledge store (lexico-semantic processing) and identifies the relationships among them to construct a complex meaning (syntactic or combinatorial processing). Do these two sets of processes rely on distinct, specialized mechanisms or, rather, share a common pool of resources? Linguistic theorizing, empirical evidence from language acquisition and processing, and computational modeling have jointly painted a picture whereby lexico-semantic and syntactic processing are deeply inter-connected and perhaps not separable. In contrast, many current proposals of the neural architecture of language continue to endorse a view whereby certain brain regions selectively support syntactic/combinatorial processing, although the locus of such "syntactic hub", and its nature, vary across proposals. Here, we searched for selectivity for syntactic over lexico-semantic processing using a powerful individual-subjects fMRI approach across three sentence comprehension paradigms that have been used in prior work to argue for such selectivity: responses to lexico-semantic vs. morpho-syntactic violations (Experiment 1); recovery from neural suppression across pairs of sentences differing in only lexical items vs. only syntactic structure (Experiment 2); and same/different meaning judgments on such sentence pairs (Experiment 3). Across experiments, both lexico-semantic and syntactic conditions elicited robust responses throughout the left fronto-temporal language network. Critically, however, no regions were more strongly engaged by syntactic than lexico-semantic processing, although some regions showed the opposite pattern. Thus, contra many current proposals of the neural architecture of language, syntactic/combinatorial processing is not separable from lexico-semantic processing at the level of brain regions-or even voxel subsets-within the language network, in line with strong integration between these two processes that has been consistently observed in behavioral and computational language research. The results further suggest that the language network may be generally more strongly concerned with meaning than syntactic form, in line with the primary function of language-to share meanings across minds.