Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Neuroimage. 2010 Apr 1;50(2):665-77. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2009.12.123. Epub 2010 Jan 7.
There is increasing experimental evidence that processing action-related language results in the automatic activation of associated regions of the motor and premotor cortex. However, the functional significance of motor activation in language processing is still under debate. In the present EEG study, we set out to investigate if language-induced motor activation primarily reflects the retrieval of lexical-semantic information or post-lexical motor imagery. The processing of action verbs was found accompanied by an early activation of motor-related brain areas, as reflected by a desynchronization in the mu- and beta-frequency bands which was localized to motor and premotor areas. A stronger motor activation was observed for verbs presented in an animal context (e.g. "The deer jumped over the stream") compared to a human context (e.g. "The athlete jumped over the fence") and motor resonance was directly modulated by the cloze probability of the noun-verb pairs. The onset of the motor effects preceded classical measures of semantic integration (i.e. the N400 component) and the strength of motor activation was found inversely related to the size of the N400 effect. These findings support the hypothesis that motor activation in language processing primarily supports the retrieval and integration of lexical-semantic information.
越来越多的实验证据表明，处理与动作相关的语言会导致运动和运动前皮质的相关区域自动激活。然而，语言处理中运动激活的功能意义仍存在争议。在本 EEG 研究中，我们旨在探讨语言引起的运动激活主要反映词汇语义信息的检索还是词汇后运动想象。动作动词的处理伴随着运动相关脑区的早期激活，表现为 mu 和 beta 频带的去同步化，定位于运动和运动前区。与在人类语境中呈现的动词（例如“运动员跳过栅栏”）相比，在动物语境中呈现的动词（例如“鹿跳过溪流”）会引起更强的运动激活，并且运动共鸣直接受到名词-动词对的 cloze 概率的调制。运动效应的出现早于语义整合的经典测量（即 N400 成分），并且运动激活的强度与 N400 效应的大小呈反比。这些发现支持这样一种假设，即在语言处理中运动激活主要支持词汇语义信息的检索和整合。
