Access to lexical meaning in pitch-flattened Chinese sentences: An fMRI study
Access to lexical meaning in pitch-flattened Chinese sentences: An fMRI study
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DOI：
10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2012.12.006
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发表时间：
2013-02-01
期刊：
影响因子：
2.6
通讯作者：
Li, Ping
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Xu, Guoqing;Zhang, Linjun;Li, Ping
汉语是一种声调语言，利用音高的变化来区分词义。因此，为了理解一个单词，听者除了提取其音素外，还必须提取音高模式。如果单词的音调模式改变，在句子上下文中仍然可以获得正确的单词含义吗？如果是这样的话，这是如何实现的？本研究试图用事件相关功能磁共振成像(FMRI)来解决这些问题。以普通话为母语的人在扫描仪里听正常的、音调平坦的(单调)语音。行为测试结果表明，他们对单调句子的评价与正常句子一样容易理解，并且在两种句子的听写测试中表现得同样好。FMRI结果显示，两类句子在左侧岛状回、中回和下回的激活程度相似，但单调句子在左侧颞叶平面(PT)的激活程度高于正常句子。这些结果表明，在音调平坦化的汉语句子中，词汇意义仍然能够被获得，并且这一过程是通过从变化的声调模式中自动恢复词汇声调的语音表征来实现的。我们的发现表明，即使在普通话这样的声调语言中，口语音调模式的细节对于句子理解过程中充分的词汇语义处理也不是必不可少的，因为听者可以自动使用额外的神经和认知资源来恢复句子中扭曲的声调模式。(C)2012爱思唯尔有限公司。保留所有权利。
Chinese is a tonal language in which variation in pitch is used to distinguish word meanings. Thus, in order to understand a word, listeners have to extract the pitch patterns in addition to its phonemes. Can the correct word meaning still be accessed in sentence contexts if pitch patterns of words are altered? If so, how is this accomplished? The present study attempts to address such questions with event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Native speakers of Mandarin Chinese listened to normal and pitch-flattened (monotone) speech inside the scanner. The behavioral results indicated that they rated monotone sentences as intelligible as normal sentences, and performed equally well in a dictation test on the two types of sentences. The fMRI results showed that both types of sentences elicited similar activation in the left insular, middle and inferior temporal gyri, but the monotone sentences elicited greater activation in the left planum temporale (PT) compared with normal sentences. These results demonstrate that lexical meaning can still be accessed in pitch-flattened Chinese sentences, and that this process is realized by automatic recovery of the phonological representations of lexical tones from the altered tonal patterns. Our findings suggest that the details of spoken pitch patterns are not essential for adequate lexical-semantic processing during sentence comprehension even in tonal languages like Mandarin Chinese, given that listeners can automatically use additional neural and cognitive resources to recover distorted tonal patterns in sentences. (c) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.