MacSweeney Mairéad, Woll Bencie, Campbell Ruth, Calvert Gemma A, McGuire Philip K, David Anthony S, Simmons Andrew, Brammer Michael J
Institute of Child Health, University College London, UK.
J Cogn Neurosci. 2002 Oct 1;14(7):1064-75. doi: 10.1162/089892902320474517.
In all signed languages used by deaf people, signs are executed in "sign space" in front of the body. Some signed sentences use this space to map detailed "real-world" spatial relationships directly. Such sentences can be considered to exploit sign space "topographically." Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we explored the extent to which increasing the topographic processing demands of signed sentences was reflected in the differential recruitment of brain regions in deaf and hearing native signers of the British Sign Language. When BSL signers performed a sentence anomaly judgement task, the occipito-temporal junction was activated bilaterally to a greater extent for topographic than nontopographic processing. The differential role of movement in the processing of the two sentence types may account for this finding. In addition, enhanced activation was observed in the left inferior and superior parietal lobules during processing of topographic BSL sentences. We argue that the left parietal lobe is specifically involved in processing the precise configuration and location of hands in space to represent objects, agents, and actions. Importantly, no differences in these regions were observed when hearing people heard and saw English translations of these sentences. Despite the high degree of similarity in the neural systems underlying signed and spoken languages, exploring the linguistic features which are unique to each of these broadens our understanding of the systems involved in language comprehension.
在聋人使用的所有手语中，手势都是在身体前方的“手语空间”中做出的。一些手语句子会直接利用这个空间来映射详细的“现实世界”空间关系。这样的句子可以被认为是在“地形学上”利用手语空间。我们使用功能磁共振成像技术，探究了增加手语句子的地形学处理需求在多大程度上反映在英国手语的聋人和听力正常的本土手语使用者大脑区域的不同募集情况上。当英国手语使用者执行句子异常判断任务时，枕颞交界处双侧在地形学处理时比非地形学处理时被激活的程度更大。两种句子类型处理过程中动作的不同作用可能解释了这一发现。此外，在处理地形学英国手语句子时，左顶叶下部和上部小叶观察到激活增强。我们认为，左顶叶特别参与处理手部在空间中代表物体、施动者和动作的精确构型和位置。重要的是，当听力正常的人听到并看到这些句子的英语翻译时，在这些区域未观察到差异。尽管手语和口语的神经系统有高度相似性，但探索每种语言独有的语言特征拓宽了我们对语言理解所涉及系统的认识。
