Phonological Networks in Language Production and Comprehension

当前的大脑语言理论主要关注语言的产生或感知和理解。解释两者的多模态理论在很大程度上缺失或没有得到足够详细的阐述。在法国和德国分别专注于语音生成和语音理解的科学家的共同努力下，该项目将用法语和德语进行并行生成和理解实验，以提高我们对语言大脑机制的理解。为此，将使用一系列尖端神经科学技术（MEG、EEG、fMRI、DTI/DWI、TMS）来绘制皮质区域及其在语音生成和理解任务中的激活时间过程，以及它们对这些任务所需过程的功能贡献。主要关注点是额叶和运动皮层与颞叶和听觉皮层对语音产生和理解中的语音处理的相对贡献。因此，最小对，即仅在一种语言声音中不同的有意义的单词对（例如，“猴子”与“驴”），将在生产和理解实验中进行研究，以查明指示语音之间区别的大脑激活是否在不同模态中保持恒定，并在两种任务（感知和生产）中发挥相似的功能作用。具体的实验将解决当前语言神经科学学者们争论的重要争议问题，包括理解和产生中语音和语义语用信息获取的串行性与并行性，特别是，尽管后颞区与产生和理解相关，但前语言区域，特别是运动系统是否只对产生至关重要，而不是对语言的感知和理解至关重要。我们期望这个项目将极大地有助于更好地理解大脑语言关系，特别是因为我们的工作由于系统地使用了两种主要的欧洲语言，将呈现已经具有一定跨语言有效性的结果，因为它们适用于法语和德语，因此不太可能受到实验语言研究中有时出现的混淆的影响。该计划项目的进一步重要附加值来自主要研究人员在语言产生和理解理论和实验方面的互补专业知识，以及他们对所有主要神经科学方法的共同全面覆盖以及他们先前存在的协同合作。

Current brain language theories primarily focus either on language production or on its perception and comprehension; multimodal theories that explain both are largely missing or are not worked out in sufficient detail. In a joint effort of French and German scientists specializing, respectively, in speech production and speech comprehension, this project will perform parallel production and comprehension experiments in French and German to improve our understanding of the brain mechanisms of language. To do so, a range of cutting-edge neuroscience techniques will be used (MEG, EEG, fMRI, DTI/DWI, TMS) to map the cortical areas and their activation time course in speech production and comprehension tasks along with their functional contributions to the processes required for these tasks. A main focus will be on the relative contributions of frontal and motor vs temporal and auditory cortices to phonological processing in speech production and comprehension. Therefore, minimal pairs, that is, meaningful word pairs only distinct in one language sound (e.g., “monkey” vs. “donkey”), will be studied in production and comprehension experiments to find out whether brain activations indexing the discrimination between speech sounds are constant across modalities and play a similar functional role in both kinds of tasks (perceptual and productive). Specific experiments will address important controversial issues currently disputed amongst scholars in the neuroscience of language, including the seriality vs. parallelism of phonological and semantic-pragmatic information access in both comprehension and production and, specifically, the question whether, although posterior temporal areas are relevant for both production and comprehension, the anterior language areas and particularly the motor system are critical only for production but not for perception and understanding of language. We expect that this project will significantly contribute to a better understanding of brain language relationships especially as our work, due to its systematic use of two major European languages, will present results that already have some cross linguistic validity, because they apply to both French and German, thus being less likely to be subject to confounds sometimes emerging in experimental linguistic research. Further crucial added value of the planned project comes from the principal investigators’ complementary expertises in language production and comprehension theory and experiment, along with their joint full coverage of all major neuroscience methods and their pre-existant synergistic collaboration.