Miceli Gabriele, Turriziani Patrizia, Caltagirone Carlo, Capasso Rita, Tomaiuolo Francesco, Caramazza Alfonso
Università Cattolica, Rome, Italy and Istituto di Psicologia, CNR, Rome, Italy. g.miceli@mclink .it
J Cogn Neurosci. 2002 May 15;14(4):618-28. doi: 10.1162/08989290260045855.
In an fMRI experiment, subjects saw a written noun and made three distinct decisions in separate sessions: Is its grammatical gender masculine or feminine (grammatical feature task)? Is it an animal or an artifact (semantic task)? Does it contain a /tch/ or a /k/ sound (phonological task)? Relative to the other experimental conditions, the grammatical feature task activated areas of the left middle and inferior frontal gyrus and of the left middle and inferior temporal gyrus. These activations fit in well with neuropsychological studies that document the correlation between left frontal lesions and damage to morphological processes in agrammatism, and the correlation between left temporal lesions and failure to access lexical representations in anomia. Taken together, these data suggest that grammatical gender is processed in a left frontotemporal network. In addition, the observation that the grammatical feature task and the phonology task activated neighboring but distinct regions of the left frontal lobe provides a plausible neuroanatomical basis for the systematic occurrence of phonological errors in aphasic subjects with morphological deficits.
在一项功能磁共振成像（fMRI）实验中，受试者看到一个书面名词，并在不同的阶段做出三种不同的判断：它的语法性属是阳性还是阴性（语法特征任务）？它是动物还是人工制品（语义任务）？它包含/tch/音还是/k/音（语音任务）？相对于其他实验条件，语法特征任务激活了左额中回和额下回以及左颞中回和颞下回区域。这些激活与神经心理学研究结果非常吻合，这些研究记录了左额叶病变与语法缺失中形态学过程受损之间的相关性，以及左颞叶病变与命名性失语中无法获取词汇表征之间的相关性。综合来看，这些数据表明语法性属是在左额颞网络中进行处理的。此外，语法特征任务和语音任务激活了左额叶相邻但不同区域的这一观察结果，为患有形态学缺陷的失语症患者系统性出现语音错误提供了一个合理的神经解剖学基础。
