Froyen Dries, Van Atteveldt Nienke, Bonte Milene, Blomert Leo
Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, Faculty of Psychology, University of Maastricht, Maastricht Brain Imaging Center, Maastricht, The Netherlands.
Neurosci Lett. 2008 Jan 3;430(1):23-8. doi: 10.1016/j.neulet.2007.10.014. Epub 2007 Oct 25.
Recently brain imaging evidence indicated that letter/speech-sound integration, necessary for establishing fluent reading, takes place in auditory association areas and that the integration is influenced by stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between the letter and the speech-sound. In the present study, we used a specific ERP measure known for its automatic character, the mismatch negativity (MMN), to investigate the time course and automaticity of letter/speech-sound integration. We studied the effect of visual letters and SOA on the MMN elicited by a deviant speech-sound. We found a clear enhancement of the MMN by simultaneously presenting a letter, but without changing the auditory stimulation. This enhancement diminishes linearly with increasing SOA. These results suggest that letters and speech-sounds are processed as compound stimuli early and automatically in the auditory association cortex of fluent readers and that this processing is strongly dependent on timing.
最近，脑成像证据表明，流畅阅读所必需的字母/语音整合发生在听觉联合区，并且这种整合受字母与语音之间的刺激起始异步性（SOA）影响。在本研究中，我们使用一种以其自动特性而闻名的特定ERP测量方法——失配负波（MMN），来研究字母/语音整合的时间进程和自动性。我们研究了视觉字母和SOA对由异常语音诱发的MMN的影响。我们发现，通过同时呈现一个字母，MMN明显增强，但不改变听觉刺激。这种增强随着SOA的增加呈线性减弱。这些结果表明，在流畅阅读者的听觉联合皮层中，字母和语音作为复合刺激在早期就被自动处理，并且这种处理强烈依赖于时间。
