Stringaris Argyris K, Medford Nicholas, Giora Rachel, Giampietro Vincent C, Brammer Michael J, David Anthony S
Section of Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, Institute of Psychiatry at the Maudsley, King's College London, PO 68 Denmark Hill, London SE5 8AF, UK.
Neuroimage. 2006 Nov 1;33(2):784-93. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2006.06.057. Epub 2006 Sep 11.
We used event-related fMRI (ER-fMRI) to test the hypothesis that metaphors bias cognitive processing of semantic relatedness towards a search for a wider range of associations. Twelve right-handed male volunteers read a mixture of metaphoric and literal sentences, each sentence being followed by a single word, which could be semantically related or not to the preceding sentence context. We found that judging unrelated words as contextually irrelevant was associated with increased blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) signal in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex in the metaphoric but not in the literal condition. The same region was also activated when subjects endorsed a semantic relation between words and metaphoric sentence primes but not between words and literal sentence primes. We argue that these results are consistent with the notion of semantic open-endedness, whereby figurative statements bias cognitive processing towards a search for a wider range of semantic relationships compared to literal statements, and thus lend further support to the view that coarse semantic coding occurs preferentially in the right hemisphere.
我们使用事件相关功能磁共振成像（ER-fMRI）来检验这样一个假设：隐喻会使语义相关性的认知加工偏向于寻找更广泛的联想。12名右利手男性志愿者阅读隐喻句和直述句的混合句子，每个句子后接一个单词，该单词可能与前文句子语境在语义上相关或不相关。我们发现，在隐喻条件下而非直述条件下，将不相关单词判断为与语境无关与右侧腹外侧前额叶皮质中血氧水平依赖（BOLD）信号增强有关。当受试者认可单词与隐喻句启动词之间的语义关系而非单词与直述句启动词之间的语义关系时，同一区域也会被激活。我们认为，这些结果与语义开放性的概念一致，即与直述语句相比，比喻性陈述会使认知加工偏向于寻找更广泛的语义关系，因此进一步支持了这样一种观点，即粗略语义编码优先发生在右半球。
