Corina David P, Knapp Heather Patterson
University of California Davis, Davis, CA, USA.
Ann N Y Acad Sci. 2008 Dec;1145:100-12. doi: 10.1196/annals.1416.023.
In the quest to further understand the neural underpinning of human communication, researchers have turned to studies of naturally occurring signed languages used in Deaf communities. The comparison of the commonalities and differences between spoken and signed languages provides an opportunity to determine core neural systems responsible for linguistic communication independent of the modality in which a language is expressed. The present article examines such studies, and in addition asks what we can learn about human languages by contrasting formal visual-gestural linguistic systems (signed languages) with more general human action perception. To understand visual language perception, it is important to distinguish the demands of general human motion processing from the highly task-dependent demands associated with extracting linguistic meaning from arbitrary, conventionalized gestures. This endeavor is particularly important because theorists have suggested close homologies between perception and production of actions and functions of human language and social communication. We review recent behavioral, functional imaging, and neuropsychological studies that explore dissociations between the processing of human actions and signed languages. These data suggest incomplete overlap between the mirror-neuron systems proposed to mediate human action and language.
为了进一步理解人类交流的神经基础，研究人员转向了对聋人社区中自然使用的手语的研究。对比口语和手语之间的异同，为确定负责语言交流的核心神经系统提供了一个机会，而这与语言表达的方式无关。本文审视了此类研究，此外还探讨了通过将形式化的视觉手势语言系统（手语）与更一般的人类动作感知进行对比，我们能对人类语言有哪些了解。为了理解视觉语言感知，区分一般人类动作处理的要求与从任意的、约定俗成的手势中提取语言意义所涉及的高度依赖任务的要求非常重要。这项工作尤为重要，因为理论家们认为动作的感知与产生和人类语言及社会交流的功能之间存在密切的同源关系。我们回顾了最近的行为学、功能成像和神经心理学研究，这些研究探讨了人类动作处理和手语处理之间的分离。这些数据表明，被认为介导人类动作和语言的镜像神经元系统之间存在不完全重叠。
