Shtyrov Yury, Pulvermüller Friedemann, Näätänen Risto, Ilmoniemi Risto J
Medical Research Council, Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge, UK.
J Cogn Neurosci. 2003 Nov 15;15(8):1195-206. doi: 10.1162/089892903322598148.
To address the cerebral processing of grammar, we used whole-head high-density magnetoencephalography to record the brain's magnetic fields elicited by grammatically correct and incorrect auditory stimuli in the absence of directed attention to the stimulation. The stimuli were minimal short phrases of the Finnish language differing only in one single phoneme (word-final inflectional affix), which rendered them as either grammatical or ungrammatical. Acoustic and lexical differences were controlled for by using an orthogonal design in which the phoneme's effect on grammaticality was inverted. We found that occasional syntactically incorrect stimuli elicited larger mismatch negativity (MMN) responses than correct phrases. The MMN was earlier proposed as an index of preattentive automatic speech processing. Therefore, its modulation by grammaticality under nonattend conditions suggests that early syntax processing in the human brain may take place outside the focus of attention. Source analysis (single-dipole models and minimum-norm current estimates) indicated grammaticality dependent differential activation of the left superior temporal cortex suggesting that this brain structure may play an important role in such automatic grammar processing.
为了研究语法的大脑处理机制，我们使用全头高密度脑磁图来记录在没有对刺激进行定向注意的情况下，由语法正确和错误的听觉刺激所引发的大脑磁场。刺激是芬兰语的简短短语，仅在一个音素（词尾屈折词缀）上有所不同，这使得它们要么合乎语法，要么不合语法。通过使用正交设计来控制声学和词汇差异，其中音素对语法性的影响是相反的。我们发现，偶尔出现的句法错误刺激比正确短语引发更大的失配负波（MMN）反应。MMN 早期被提议作为前注意自动语音处理的指标。因此，在非注意条件下其受语法性的调节表明，人类大脑中的早期句法处理可能发生在注意力焦点之外。源分析（单偶极子模型和最小范数电流估计）表明，左颞上回皮质存在语法依赖性差异激活，这表明该脑结构可能在这种自动语法处理中起重要作用。
