Multiple Regions of a Cortical Network Commonly Encode the Meaning of Words in Multiple Grammatical Positions of Read Sentences
Multiple Regions of a Cortical Network Commonly Encode the Meaning of Words in Multiple Grammatical Positions of Read Sentences
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DOI：
10.1093/cercor/bhy110
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发表时间：
2019-06-01
期刊：
影响因子：
3.7
通讯作者：
Wang, Xixi
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Anderson, Andrew James;Lalor, Edmund C.;Wang, Xixi
破译句子含义在大脑中的表达方式仍然是科学面临的重大挑战。最近研究表明，当阅读句子中的连续单词时，分布式大脑区域会同时出现语义相关的神经活动。然而，不同区域代表什么语义内容，它们之间有什么共同点，以及它们与句子中不同语法位置的单词之间的关系，人们却知之甚少。为了解决这些问题，我们应用词义语义模型来解释句子阅读中引发的大脑激活模式。该模型基于人类对词语（及其所指对象）体验的 65 种感觉/运动/情感和认知特征的评分。通过将功能性磁共振成像激活映射回模型空间的过程，我们测试：哪些大脑区域对不同语法位置（例如，主语/动词/宾语）的内容词进行语义编码；以及不同区域编码了哪些语义特征。在左颞叶、下顶叶和下/上额叶区域，我们检测所有测试的语法位置中单词的语义编码，并揭示语义表示的多个常见组成部分。这表明句子理解涉及多个单词含义的共同核心表示，这些单词含义被编码在分布于大脑的区域网络中。
Deciphering how sentence meaning is represented in the brain remains a major challenge to science. Semantically related neural activity has recently been shown to arise concurrently in distributed brain regions as successive words in a sentence are read. However, what semantic content is represented by different regions, what is common across them, and how this relates to words in different grammatical positions of sentences is weakly understood. To address these questions, we apply a semantic model of word meaning to interpret brain activation patterns elicited in sentence reading. The model is based on human ratings of 65 sensory/motor/emotional and cognitive features of experience with words (and their referents). Through a process of mapping functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging activation back into model space we test: which brain regions semantically encode content words in different grammatical positions (e.g., subject/verb/object); and what semantic features are encoded by different regions. In left temporal, inferior parietal, and inferior/superior frontal regions we detect the semantic encoding of words in all grammatical positions tested and reveal multiple common components of semantic representation. This suggests that sentence comprehension involves a common core representation of multiple words' meaning being encoded in a network of regions distributed across the brain.