Past tense in the brain's time: Neurophysiological evidence for dual-route processing of past-tense verbs
Past tense in the brain's time: Neurophysiological evidence for dual-route processing of past-tense verbs
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DOI：
10.1016/j.neuroimage.2012.12.065
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发表时间：
2013-05-01
期刊：
影响因子：
5.7
通讯作者：
Shtyrov, Yury
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Bakker, Iske;MacGregor, Lucy J.;Shtyrov, Yury
神经语言学和心理语言学中的一个有争议的问题是动词的常规过去时形式是按词汇存储的还是通过应用抽象组合模式（例如词缀规则）有效地生成。模型在解释这一特定问题方面的成功或失败可以用来得出关于认知以及抽象、符号表征和规则在心理和神经生物学上的真实程度的更一般的结论。这一争论有可能通过神经生理学范式得到解决，其中对词汇和句法处理的大脑反应模式的替代预测进行了测试。我们使用脑磁图（MEG）记录对口头单词素词（“隐藏”）、伪词（“微笑”）、规则过去时形式（“哭”）和不合语法（过度规则化）过去时形式（“飞”）的神经反应，这是一种被动聆听的奇怪范式，其中词汇和句法调制的刺激已知会引发失配负性（MMN）大脑的不同模式回应。我们观察到相对于伪词，单词素词有增强的（“词汇的”）MMN，但相对于语法形式的不合语法的过去时态的逆向（“句法”）MMN。对单词素和双词素刺激的反应之间的这种分离表明，常规过去时态的处理与句法序列比词汇存储的单词素单词更相似，这表明常规过去时态是通过将组合方案应用于其单独表示的词干和词缀而有效地生成的。我们建议离散的组合神经元组件，它将顺序出现的词汇元素的类别绑定到形态上复杂的单元中，作为规则过去时态变化的神经生物学基础。 (C) 2013 Elsevier Inc. 保留所有权利。
A controversial issue in neuro- and psycholinguistics is whether regular past-tense forms of verbs are stored lexically or generated productively by the application of abstract combinatorial schemas, for example affixation rules. The success or failure of models in accounting for this particular issue can be used to draw more general conclusions about cognition and the degree to which abstract, symbolic representations and rules are psychologically and neurobiologically real. This debate can potentially be resolved using a neurophysiological paradigm, in which alternative predictions of the brain response patterns for lexical and syntactic processing are put to the test. We used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to record neural responses to spoken monomorphemic words ('hide'), pseudowords ('smide'), regular past-tense forms ('cried') and ungrammatical (overregularised) past-tense forms ('flied') in a passive listening oddball paradigm, in which lexically and syntactically modulated stimuli are known to elicit distinct patterns of the mismatch negativity (MMN) brain response. We observed an enhanced ('lexical') MMN to monomorphemic words relative to pseudowords, but a reversed ('syntactic') MMN to ungrammatically inflected past tenses relative to grammatical forms. This dissociation between responses to monomorphemic and bimorphemic stimuli indicates that regular past tenses are processed more similarly to syntactic sequences than to lexically stored monomorphemic words, suggesting that regular past tenses are generated productively by the application of a combinatorial scheme to their separately represented stems and affixes. We suggest discrete combinatorial neuronal assemblies, which bind classes of sequentially occurring lexical elements into morphologically complex units, as the neurobiological basis of regular past tense inflection. (C) 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.