Varley Rosemary A, Klessinger Nicolai J C, Romanowski Charles A J, Siegal Michael
Department of Human Communication Sciences, University of Sheffield, Sheffield S10 2TA, United Kingdom.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2005 Mar 1;102(9):3519-24. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0407470102. Epub 2005 Feb 15.
A central question in cognitive neuroscience concerns the extent to which language enables other higher cognitive functions. In the case of mathematics, the resources of the language faculty, both lexical and syntactic, have been claimed to be important for exact calculation, and some functional brain imaging studies have shown that calculation is associated with activation of a network of left-hemisphere language regions, such as the angular gyrus and the banks of the intraparietal sulcus. We investigate the integrity of mathematical calculations in three men with large left-hemisphere perisylvian lesions. Despite severe grammatical impairment and some difficulty in processing phonological and orthographic number words, all basic computational procedures were intact across patients. All three patients solved mathematical problems involving recursiveness and structure-dependent operations (for example, in generating solutions to bracket equations). To our knowledge, these results demonstrate for the first time the remarkable independence of mathematical calculations from language grammar in the mature cognitive system.
认知神经科学中的一个核心问题是语言在多大程度上能够促进其他高级认知功能。就数学而言，语言能力（包括词汇和句法）的资源被认为对精确计算很重要，一些功能性脑成像研究表明，计算与左半球语言区域网络的激活有关，如角回和顶内沟壁。我们研究了三名患有左侧大脑半球外侧裂周围大面积病变男性的数学计算完整性。尽管存在严重的语法障碍以及在处理语音和正字数字词方面存在一些困难，但所有患者的基本计算程序均完好无损。所有三名患者都解决了涉及递归和结构依赖运算的数学问题（例如，在生成括号方程的解时）。据我们所知，这些结果首次证明了在成熟的认知系统中数学计算与语言语法具有显著的独立性。
