Eviatar Zohar, Just Marcel Adam
Institute of Information Processing and Decision Making, Psychology Department, University of Haifa, Haifa 31905, Israel.
Neuropsychologia. 2006;44(12):2348-59. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2006.05.007. Epub 2006 Jun 23.
Higher levels of discourse processing evoke patterns of cognition and brain activation that extend beyond the literal comprehension of sentences. We used fMRI to examine brain activation patterns while 16 healthy participants read brief three-sentence stories that concluded with either a literal, metaphoric, or ironic sentence. The fMRI images acquired during the reading of the critical sentence revealed a selective response of the brain to the two types of nonliteral utterances. Metaphoric utterances resulted in significantly higher levels of activation in the left inferior frontal gyrus and in bilateral inferior temporal cortex than the literal and ironic utterances. Ironic statements resulted in significantly higher activation levels than literal statements in the right superior and middle temporal gyri, with metaphoric statements resulting in intermediate levels in these regions. The findings show differential hemispheric sensitivity to these aspects of figurative language, and are relevant to models of the functional cortical architecture of language processing in connected discourse.
更高层次的语篇处理所引发的认知和大脑激活模式，超出了对句子字面意义的理解。我们使用功能磁共振成像（fMRI）来检测16名健康参与者阅读简短的三句话故事时的大脑激活模式，这些故事以字面、隐喻或讽刺的句子结尾。在阅读关键句子期间获取的功能磁共振成像图像显示，大脑对两种非字面话语有选择性反应。与字面和讽刺话语相比，隐喻话语在左侧额下回和双侧颞下回皮质中引发的激活水平显著更高。讽刺语句在右侧颞上回和颞中回引发的激活水平显著高于字面语句，而隐喻语句在这些区域引发的激活水平处于中间。这些发现表明大脑半球对比喻性语言的这些方面具有不同的敏感性，并且与连贯语篇中语言处理的功能性皮质结构模型相关。
