Friederici Angela D, Weissenborn Jürgen
Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Stephanstr. 1a, 04103 Leipzig, Germany.
Brain Res. 2007 May 18;1146:50-8. doi: 10.1016/j.brainres.2006.08.038. Epub 2006 Sep 7.
The understanding of sentences involves not only the retrieval of the meaning of single words, but the identification of the relation between a verb and its arguments. The way the brain manages to process word meaning and syntactic relations during language comprehension on-line still is a matter of debate. Here we review the different views discussed in the literature and report data from crucial experiments investigating the temporal and neurotopological parameters of different information types encoded in verbs, i.e. word category information, the verb's argument structure information, the verb's selectional restriction and the morphosyntactic information encoded in the verb's inflection. The neurophysiological indices of the processes dealing with these different information types suggest an initial independence of the processing of word category information from other information types as the basis of local phrase structure building, and a later processing stage during which different information types interact. The relative ordering of the subprocesses appears to be universal, whereas the absolute timing of when during later phrases interaction takes places varies as a function of when the relevant information becomes available. Moreover, the neurophysiological indices for non-local dependency relations vary as a function of the morphological richness of the language.
对句子的理解不仅涉及单个单词意义的检索，还涉及动词与其论元之间关系的识别。大脑在在线语言理解过程中如何处理单词意义和句法关系仍是一个有争议的问题。在这里，我们回顾了文献中讨论的不同观点，并报告了关键实验的数据，这些实验研究了动词中编码的不同信息类型的时间和神经拓扑参数，即词类信息、动词的论元结构信息、动词的选择限制以及动词屈折变化中编码的形态句法信息。处理这些不同信息类型的过程的神经生理指标表明，在构建局部短语结构的基础上，词类信息的处理最初与其他信息类型相互独立，而在后期处理阶段，不同信息类型会相互作用。子过程的相对顺序似乎是普遍的，而后期短语相互作用发生的绝对时间则根据相关信息何时可用而变化。此外，非局部依存关系的神经生理指标会因语言的形态丰富程度而有所不同。
