Harris Jesse, Pylkkänen Liina, McElree Brian, Frisson Steven
Department of Psychology, New York University, 6 Washington Place, Room 870, New York, NY 10003, USA.
Brain Lang. 2008 Oct;107(1):44-61. doi: 10.1016/j.bandl.2007.09.001. Epub 2007 Oct 29.
Although natural language appears to be largely compositional, the meanings of certain expressions cannot be straightforwardly recovered from the meanings of their parts. This study examined the online processing of one such class of expressions: concealed questions, in which the meaning of a complex noun phrase (the proof of the theorem) shifts to a covert question (what the proof of the theorem is) when mandated by a sub-class of question-selecting verbs (e.g., guess). Previous behavioral and magnetoencephalographic (MEG) studies have reported a cost associated with converting an entity denotation to an event. Our study tested whether both types of meaning-shift affect the same computational resources by examining the effects elicited by concealed questions in eye-tracking and MEG. Experiment 1 found evidence from eye-movements that verbs requiring the concealed question interpretation require more processing time than verbs that do not support a shift in meaning. Experiment 2 localized the cost of the concealed question interpretation in the left posterior temporal region, an area distinct from that affected by complement coercion. Experiment 3 presented the critical verbs in isolation and found no posterior temporal effect, confirming that the effect of Experiment 2 reflected sentential, and not lexical-level, processing.
虽然自然语言在很大程度上似乎具有组合性，但某些表达式的含义并不能直接从其组成部分的含义中推导出来。本研究考察了一类这样的表达式的在线加工过程：隐性疑问句，即当由一类特定的疑问选择动词（如guess）规定时，复杂名词短语（定理的证明）的含义会转变为一个隐性问题（定理的证明是什么）。先前的行为学和脑磁图（MEG）研究报告了与将实体指称转换为事件相关的代价。我们的研究通过考察隐性疑问句在眼动追踪和MEG中引发的效应，来测试这两种意义转变是否影响相同的计算资源。实验1从眼动中发现证据，表明需要隐性疑问句解释的动词比不支持意义转变的动词需要更多的加工时间。实验2将隐性疑问句解释的代价定位在左后颞区，该区域与受补语强制影响的区域不同。实验3单独呈现关键动词，未发现后颞叶效应，证实实验2的效应反映的是句子层面而非词汇层面的加工。
