Wingfield Arthur, Grossman Murray
Volen National Center for Complex Systems, MS 013, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA 02454-9110, USA.
J Neurophysiol. 2006 Dec;96(6):2830-9. doi: 10.1152/jn.00628.2006.
Human aging brings with it declines in sensory function, both in vision and in hearing, as well as a general slowing in a variety of perceptual and cognitive operations. Yet in spite of these declines, language comprehension typically remains well preserved in normal aging. We review data from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to describe a two-component model of sentence comprehension: a core sentence-processing area located in the perisylvian region of the left cerebral hemisphere and an associated network of brain regions that support the working memory and other resources needed for comprehension of long or syntactically complex sentences. We use this two-component model to describe the nature of compensatory recruitment of novel brain regions observed when healthy older adults show the same success at comprehending sentences as their younger adult counterparts. We suggest that this plasticity in neural recruitment contributes to the stability of language comprehension in the aging brain.
人类衰老会导致视觉和听觉等感官功能下降，以及各种感知和认知操作普遍减缓。然而，尽管有这些衰退，在正常衰老过程中，语言理解能力通常仍能得到很好的保留。我们回顾了功能磁共振成像（fMRI）的数据，以描述句子理解的双成分模型：一个位于左脑半球颞叶周围区域的核心句子处理区域，以及一个相关的脑区网络，该网络支持理解长句或句法复杂句子所需的工作记忆和其他资源。我们使用这个双成分模型来描述当健康的老年人在句子理解方面与年轻成年人表现出同样成功时所观察到的新脑区代偿性募集的性质。我们认为，这种神经募集的可塑性有助于衰老大脑中语言理解的稳定性。
