Neural correlate of the construction of sentence meaning
Neural correlate of the construction of sentence meaning
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DOI：
10.1073/pnas.1612132113
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发表时间：
2016-10-11
影响因子：
11.1
通讯作者：
Kanwisher, Nancy
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Fedorenko, Evelina;Scott, Terri L.;Kanwisher, Nancy
你阅读和理解这句话的能力背后的神经过程是未知的。句子理解发生得非常快，只有通过发现潜在的计算和神经事件的精确序列才能在机械水平上理解。然而，我们没有连续的和在线的神经测量的句子处理与高空间和时间分辨率。在这里，我们报告的就是这样一种测量方法：从人脑表面的颅内记录显示，当人们阅读一个句子时，神经活动（以伽马功率为指标）会单调增加，而当人们阅读和记忆非单词列表时，这种活动的稳定增加是不存在的，尽管这需要更高的认知需求，排除了一般注意力、工作记忆和认知负荷的解释。反应增加是较低的句子结构没有意义（“Jabberwocky”句子）和没有句子结构的单词意义（单词列表），表明这种效果是不能解释的反应，语法或单词意义。相反，完整的效果只在句子中发现，暗示了句子理解的组成过程，这是人类语言的一个显著而独特的特征，而不是与动物交流系统共享。这项工作开辟了新的途径，调查的序列神经事件的基础上建设的语言意义。
The neural processes that underlie your ability to read and understand this sentence are unknown. Sentence comprehension occurs very rapidly, and can only be understood at a mechanistic level by discovering the precise sequence of underlying computational and neural events. However, we have no continuous and online neural measure of sentence processing with high spatial and temporal resolution. Here we report just such a measure: intracranial recordings from the surface of the human brain show that neural activity, indexed by gamma-power, increases monotonically over the course of a sentence as people read it. This steady increase in activity is absent when people read and remember nonword-lists, despite the higher cognitive demand entailed, ruling out accounts in terms of generic attention, working memory, and cognitive load. Response increases are lower for sentence structure without meaning ("Jabberwocky" sentences) and word meaning without sentence structure (word-lists), showing that this effect is not explained by responses to syntax or word meaning alone. Instead, the full effect is found only for sentences, implicating compositional processes of sentence understanding, a striking and unique feature of human language not shared with animal communication systems. This work opens up new avenues for investigating the sequence of neural events that underlie the construction of linguistic meaning.