Spatiotemporal Neuroimaging of Situated Sentence Comprehension

描述（由申请人提供）：拟议研究的目标是表征与句子理解相关的大脑区域随时间推移的位置和功能相互作用。研究是在一个框架内进行的，该框架认为理解具有多个信息“来源”，并且是“互动的”和“情境的”。“这种句子理解的观点认为，一个句子的命题意义归根结底是由它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（分析）并将其与词汇意义结合以确定命题意义的过程来实现的。（基于句法的解释，我们将简称为“解释”）。然而，这些整合的中央过程并不是被认为是句子意义候选的命题表征的唯一来源。命题的意义也是通过语法过程来分配的，比如将施事分配给动词前名词的语法过程（理解有“多个来源”）。这些多个来源产生了在线句子含义的候选者，这些候选者最终被排除，以支持句子的句法许可解释。此外，句法分析和解释以在线方式受到各种类型的信息的影响，例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，例如任务条件（理解是“情境的”）。拟议的研究将确定参与分析和解释操作方面的大脑区域，以及它们与非语言过程的在线交互。我们将研究两种主要类型的相互作用--句法分析和解释与知觉和运动过程之间的相互作用，以及句法分析和解释与语义记忆之间的相互作用。我们将使用MR限制的整合脑磁图（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的测量，并将格兰杰因果分析（格兰杰，1969）应用于这些数据，以识别句子处理过程中功能可解释的ROI之间的方向因果影响模式。 公共卫生相关性：该项目将促进我们对句子理解过程中发生的复杂神经活动的理解。因此，这些发现将为更好地诊断此类疾病提供依据。

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.