When temporal terms belie conceptual order
When temporal terms belie conceptual order
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作者：
Münte, TF;Schiltz, K;Kutas, M
我们将时间设想为现实世界事件的顺序，从过去到现在再到未来，一个事件接着一个事件，这个概念影响了我们谈论时间的方式(我们期待时间)，以及我们实时处理涉及事件时间顺序的书面陈述的方式。诸如“之前”和“之后”这样的术语给了我们以任何顺序表达一系列事件(真实的或想象的)的语言自由。然而，没有按时间顺序呈现事件的句子需要额外的语篇级别的计算。在这里，我们通过对比两种句子类型的大脑电位来检验这些计算是如何以及何时进行的，这两种句子类型只在它们的首字母不同(‘X，Y之后’与‘X，Y之前’)之间存在差异。在左额叶头皮上，对“之前”和“之后”句子的反应在300毫秒内出现差异；这种差异的大小随着句子的过程而增加，并与个体的工作记忆跨度有关。因此，我们表明，对句子理解中单个单词的语篇含义进行神经加工会产生直接和持久的影响。
We conceive of time as a sequential order of real-world events, one event following another from past to present to future, This conception colours the way we speak of time ("we look forward to the time") and, as we show here, the way we process written statements referring to the temporal order of events, in real time. Terms such as 'before' and 'after' give us the linguistic freedom to express a series of events (real or imaginary) in any order. However, sentences that present events out of chronological order require additional discourse-level computation. Here we examine how and when these computations are carried out by contrasting brain potentials across two sentence types that differ only in their initial word ('After' X, Y versus 'Before' X,Y). At sites on the left frontal scalp, the responses to 'before' and 'after' sentences diverge within 300 ms; the size of this difference increases over the course of the sentences and is correlated with individual working-memory spans. Thus, we show that there are immediate and lasting consequences for neural processing of the discourse implications of a single word on sentence comprehension.