Spatiotemporal Neuroimaging of Situated Sentence Comprehension

描述（由申请人提供）：拟议研究的目标是描述涉及句子理解方面的大脑区域的位置和功能相互作用随时间的变化。这项研究是在一个框架内进行的，该框架将理解视为具有多种信息“来源”，并且是“互动的”和“定位的”。这种句子理解观点认为，句子的命题意义归根到底是由句子的句法结构和词汇内容决定的，当理解成功时，这个意义是通过分配句法结构（解析）并将其与词汇意义结合起来确定命题意义（基于句法的解释，我们将简称为“解释”）的过程获得的。然而，这些综合的中心过程并不是命题表征的唯一来源，命题表征被认为是句子意义的候选。命题意义也可以通过诸如启发式等异步过程来分配，启发式将代理分配给前语名词（理解有“多个来源”）。这些多种来源产生在线句子含义的候选词，最终被淘汰，以支持句子的语法许可解释。此外，语法分析和口译还受到多种信息的影响，如词汇形式的频率及其共现（理解是“互动的”），以及非语言因素，如任务条件（理解是“定位的”）。拟议的研究将确定大脑中涉及解析和解释操作以及它们与非语言过程在线互动的区域。我们将研究这些相互作用的两种主要类型-解析和解释之间以及感知和运动过程之间的相互作用，以及解析和解释与语义记忆之间的相互作用。我们将使用核磁共振约束集成脑磁图（MEG）和脑电图（EEG）来获得具有细粒度时间和空间分辨率的神经活动测量，并对这些数据应用格兰杰因果分析（Granger, 1969），以确定句子处理过程中功能可解释的roi之间的定向因果影响模式。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The goal of the proposed research is to characterize the location and functional interaction over time of areas of the brain involved in aspects of sentence comprehension. The research is undertaken within a framework that sees comprehension as having multiple information "sources," and as being "interactive" and "situated." This view of sentence comprehension maintains that the propositional meaning of a sentence is, in the final analysis, determined by its syntactic structure and lexical content, and, when comprehension is successful, this meaning is arrived at by a process that assigns syntactic structure (parsing) and combines it with lexical meanings to determine propositional meaning (syntactically-based interpretation, which we will refer to simply as "interpretation"). However, these integrated, central processes are not the only sources of propositional representations that are considered as candidates for the meaning of a sentence. Propositional meanings are also assigned by asyntactic processes such as heuristics that assign agent to a preverbal noun (comprehension has "multiple sources"). These multiple sources yield candidates for the meaning of a sentence on-line, which are eventually eliminated in favor of the syntactically licensed interpretation(s) of a sentence. In addition, parsing and interpretation are affected in an on-line fashion by a variety of types of information such as the frequency of lexical forms and their co-occurrence (comprehension is "interactive"), and by non- linguistic factors such as task conditions (comprehension is "situated"). The proposed research will identify areas of the brain that are involved in aspects of parsing and interpretive operations and their on-line interaction with non-linguistic processes. We will study the two major types of these interactions - those between parsing and interpretation and perceptual and motor processes and those between parsing and interpretation and semantic memory. We will use MR-constrained integrated magnetoencephalography (MEG) and electroelcephalography (EEG) to obtain measures of neural activity that have both fine-grained temporal and spatial resolution, and apply Granger causation analyses (Granger, 1969) to these data to identify patterns of directional causal influence between functionally interpretable ROIs during sentence processing. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: The project will advance our understanding of the complex neural activities that occur during sentence comprehension. As such, the findings will provide a basis for better diagnosis of such disorders.