Phonological Networks in Language Production and Comprehension

目前的脑语言理论主要关注语言的产生或语言的感知和理解；解释这两者的多模态理论在很大程度上是缺失的，或者没有得到足够详细的研究。在法国和德国分别专攻语音产生和语音理解的科学家的共同努力下，本项目将在法语和德语中进行并行的产生和理解实验，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）来绘制语音产生和理解任务中的皮质区域及其激活时间过程，以及它们对这些任务所需过程的功能贡献。主要的焦点将是相对的贡献额叶和运动与时间和听觉皮层在语音产生和理解语音加工。因此，最小对，即仅在一种语言声音中不同的有意义的词对（例如，“猴子”与“驴”），将在生产和理解实验中进行研究，以找出索引语音区分的大脑激活是否在不同的模态中是恒定的，并在两种任务（感知和生产）中发挥相似的功能作用。具体的实验将解决语言神经科学学者之间目前存在争议的重要争议问题，包括语音和语义语用信息获取在理解和产生中的顺序性与平行性，特别是后颞区是否与产生和理解相关的问题，前语言区，特别是运动系统只对语言的产生起关键作用，而对语言的感知和理解不起作用。我们期望这个项目将对更好地理解大脑语言关系做出重大贡献，特别是因为我们的工作，由于它系统地使用了两种主要的欧洲语言，将呈现出已经具有一些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学研究中有时出现的混淆。计划项目的进一步关键附加价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联合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.