Lexical and syntactic representations in the brain: An fMRI investigation with multi-voxel pattern analyses
Lexical and syntactic representations in the brain: An fMRI investigation with multi-voxel pattern analyses
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DOI：
10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2011.09.014
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发表时间：
2012-03-01
期刊：
影响因子：
2.6
通讯作者：
Kanwisher, Nancy
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Fedorenko, Evelina;Nieto-Castanon, Alfonso;Kanwisher, Nancy
理论语言学和心理语言学的研究表明，人类的语言知识在单个词汇和抽象的句法表征之间形成了一个连续体，大多数语言表征都介于这两个极端之间，并采取词汇与它们经常出现的句法/语义上下文一起存储的形式。神经影像学证据进一步表明，没有大脑区域是选择性地只对词汇信息或句法信息敏感。相反，所有支持高级语言处理的关键大脑区域都与词汇和句法处理有关，这表明我们的语言知识在这些大脑区域中以分布式方式呈现。鉴于语言表征的这种分布式性质，多体素模式分析（MPPA）可以帮助揭示语言系统的重要功能特性。在目前的研究中，我们使用MVPAs提出了两个问题：（1）语言大脑区域是否在词汇与句法信息的鲁棒性方面存在差异？（2）在活动模式中，语言麸区是否区分“纯”词汇信息（单词列表）和“纯”抽象句法信息（废话句）？我们发现，在许多语言区域，词汇信息比句法信息更鲁棒地表示（没有语言区域显示相反的模式），这一点可以通过更好地区分沿着词汇维度不同的条件来证明（句子与废话，单词列表与非单词列表）比在句法维度上沿着不同的条件之间（句子与单词列表，以及jabberwocky与非单词列表）。这一结果表明，在语言意义的表征中，词汇信息可能比句法信息起着更重要的作用。我们还表明，几个语言区域可靠区分“纯”词汇信息和“纯”抽象句法信息的神经活动模式。(C)2011爱思唯尔有限公司保留所有权利。
Work in theoretical linguistics and psycholinguistics suggests that human linguistic knowledge forms a continuum between individual lexical items and abstract syntactic representations, with most linguistic representations falling between the two extremes and taking the form of lexical items stored together with the syntactic/semantic contexts in which they frequently occur. Neuroimaging evidence further suggests that no brain region is selectively sensitive to only lexical information or only syntactic information. Instead, all the key brain regions that support high-level linguistic processing have been implicated in both lexical and syntactic processing, suggesting that our linguistic knowledge is plausibly represented in a distributed fashion in these brain regions. Given this distributed nature of linguistic representations, multi-voxel pattern analyses (MVPAs) can help uncover important functional properties of the language system. In the current study we use MVPAs to ask two questions: (1) Do language brain regions differ in how robustly they represent lexical vs. syntactic information? and (2) Do any of the language bran regions distinguish between "pure" lexical information (lists of words) and "pure" abstract syntactic information (jabberwocky sentences) in the pattern of activity? We show that lexical information is represented more robustly than syntactic information across many language regions (with no language region showing the opposite pattern), as evidenced by a better discrimination between conditions that differ along the lexical dimension (sentences vs. jabberwocky, and word lists vs. nonword lists) than between conditions that differ along the syntactic dimension (sentences vs. word lists, and jabberwocky vs. nonword lists). This result suggests that lexical information may play a more critical role than syntax in the representation of linguistic meaning. We also show that several language regions reliably discriminate between "pure" lexical information and "pure" abstract syntactic information in their patterns of neural activity. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.