Novick Jared M, Trueswell John C, Thompson-Schill Sharon L
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.
Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci. 2005 Sep;5(3):263-81. doi: 10.3758/cabn.5.3.263.
A century of investigation into the role of the human frontal lobes in complex cognition, including language processing, has revealed several interesting but apparently contradictory findings. In particular, the results of numerous studies suggest that left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG), which includes Broca's area, plays a direct role in sentence-level syntactic processing. In contrast, other brain-imaging and neuropsychological data indicate that LIFG is crucial for cognitive control--specifically, for overriding highly regularized, automatic processes, even when a task involves syntactically undemanding material (e.g., single words, a list of letters). We provide a unifying account of these findings, which emphasizes the importance of general cognitive control mechanisms for the syntactic processing of sentences. On the basis of a review of the neurocognitive and sentence-processing literatures, we defend the following three hypotheses: (1) LIFG is part of a network of frontal lobe subsystems that are generally responsible for the detection and resolution of incompatible stimulus representations; (2) the role of LIFG in sentence comprehension is to implement reanalysis in the face of misinterpretation; and (3) individual differences in cognitive control abilities in nonsyntactic tasks predict correlated variation in sentence-processing abilities pertaining to the recovery from misinterpretation.
一个世纪以来，针对人类额叶在包括语言处理在内的复杂认知中的作用展开的研究，揭示了一些有趣但明显相互矛盾的发现。特别是，大量研究结果表明，包括布洛卡区在内的左额下回（LIFG）在句子层面的句法处理中发挥着直接作用。相比之下，其他脑成像和神经心理学数据表明，LIFG对认知控制至关重要——具体而言，对于超越高度规范化的自动过程至关重要，即使任务涉及句法要求不高的材料（例如单个单词、字母列表）。我们对这些发现提供了一个统一的解释，强调了一般认知控制机制对句子句法处理的重要性。基于对神经认知和句子处理文献的综述，我们捍卫以下三个假设：（1）LIFG是额叶子系统网络的一部分，这些子系统通常负责检测和解决不相容的刺激表征；（2）LIFG在句子理解中的作用是在面对错误解释时进行重新分析；（3）非句法任务中认知控制能力的个体差异预测了与从错误解释中恢复相关的句子处理能力的相关变化。
