Hammer Anke, Jansma Bernadette M, Lamers Monique, Münte Thomas F
Department of Neuropsychology, Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg, Magdeburg, Germany.
Brain Res. 2008 Sep 16;1230:177-91. doi: 10.1016/j.brainres.2008.07.004. Epub 2008 Jul 9.
Event-related potentials were used to investigate the interaction of verbal working memory and gender information during pronoun resolution. Gender information is supposed to be disentangled using sentences about persons (semantic/syntactic) or things (syntactic) followed by gender congruent or incongruent pronouns. Memory was manipulated using differential distances (short distance (SD) and long distances with or without intermediate subject gaps (LD gap and LD no gap)) between the pronoun and the antecedent. Comparing incongruent to congruent conditions, person sentences with SD and LD no gap resulted in an N400-like effect indicating the involvement of semantic integration, whereas a P600 effect in LD gap (re-activated antecedents) sentences suggested the involvement of syntactic reanalysis. SD-thing sentences showed a P600 effect, whereas LD thing sentences revealed no effect at pronoun position. A delayed N400 effect for thing sentences was observed instead. Based on preceding and the current data, we present a working model on how the parser switches between the use of semantic and syntactic information to establish co-reference and how this switch depends on the type of antecedent, distance, or syntactic structure.
事件相关电位被用于研究代词消解过程中言语工作记忆与性别信息的相互作用。性别信息被认为是通过关于人物（语义/句法）或事物（句法）的句子，后跟性别一致或不一致的代词来进行区分的。通过代词与先行词之间的不同距离（短距离（SD）以及有或没有中间主语间隙的长距离（LD间隙和LD无间隙））来操纵记忆。将不一致条件与一致条件进行比较，SD和LD无间隙的人物句子会产生类似N400的效应，表明语义整合的参与，而LD间隙（重新激活先行词）句子中的P600效应则表明句法重新分析的参与。SD事物句子显示出P600效应，而LD事物句子在代词位置未显示出效应。相反，观察到事物句子存在延迟的N400效应。基于之前和当前的数据，我们提出了一个工作模型，说明句法分析器如何在使用语义和句法信息之间切换以建立共指关系，以及这种切换如何取决于先行词的类型、距离或句法结构。
