Kutas M, Federmeier KD
Departments of Cognitive Science and Neurosciences, University of California San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, 92093-0515, La Jolla, CA, USA
Trends Cogn Sci. 2000 Dec 1;4(12):463-470. doi: 10.1016/s1364-6613(00)01560-6.
The physical energy that we refer to as a word, whether in isolation or embedded in sentences, takes its meaning from the knowledge stored in our brains through a lifetime of experience. Much empirical evidence indicates that, although this knowledge can be used fairly flexibly, it is functionally organized in 'semantic memory' along a number of dimensions, including similarity and association. Here, we review recent findings using an electrophysiological brain component, the N400, that reveal the nature and timing of semantic memory use during language comprehension. These findings show that the organization of semantic memory has an inherent impact on sentence processing. The left hemisphere, in particular, seems to capitalize on the organization of semantic memory to pre-activate the meaning of forthcoming words, even if this strategy fails at times. In addition, these electrophysiological results support a view of memory in which world knowledge is distributed across multiple, plastic-yet-structured, largely modality-specific processing areas, and in which meaning is an emergent, temporally extended process, influenced by experience, context, and the nature of the brain itself.
我们所说的一个词的物理能量，无论它是单独存在还是嵌入句子中，都是通过一生的经历从存储在我们大脑中的知识中获取其意义的。大量实证证据表明，尽管这些知识可以相当灵活地使用，但它在“语义记忆”中沿着包括相似性和关联性在内的多个维度进行功能组织。在这里，我们回顾了最近使用一种脑电成分N400的研究结果，这些结果揭示了语言理解过程中语义记忆使用的性质和时间。这些发现表明，语义记忆的组织对句子处理有内在影响。特别是左半球似乎利用语义记忆的组织来预先激活即将出现的单词的意义，即使这种策略有时会失败。此外，这些脑电结果支持了一种记忆观点，即世界知识分布在多个具有可塑性但结构化的、主要是特定模态的处理区域中，并且意义是一个受经验、语境和大脑本身性质影响的、新兴的、时间上延伸的过程。
