Haskins Laboratories, 300 George Street, New Haven, Connecticut 06511, USA.
Cortex. 2011 Apr;47(4):416-31. doi: 10.1016/j.cortex.2009.11.005. Epub 2010 Jan 11.
We present new evidence based on fMRI for the existence and neural architecture of an abstract supramodal language system that can integrate linguistic inputs arising from different modalities such that speech and print each activate a common code. Working with sentence material, our aim was to find out where the putative supramodal system is located and how it responds to comprehension challenges. To probe these questions we examined BOLD activity in experienced readers while they performed a semantic categorization task with matched written or spoken sentences that were either well-formed or contained anomalies of syntactic form or pragmatic content. On whole-brain scans, both anomalies increased net activity over non-anomalous baseline sentences, chiefly at left frontal and temporal regions of heteromodal cortex. The anomaly-sensitive sites correspond approximately to those that previous studies (Michael et al., 2001; Constable et al., 2004) have found to be sensitive to other differences in sentence complexity (object relative minus subject relative). Regions of interest (ROIs) were defined by peak response to anomaly averaging over modality conditions. Each anomaly-sensitive ROI showed the same pattern of response across sentence types in each modality. Voxel-by-voxel exploration over the whole brain based on a cosine similarity measure of common function confirmed the specificity of supramodal zones.
我们提出了新的基于 fMRI 的证据，证明存在一种抽象的超模态语言系统，它可以整合来自不同模态的语言输入，使得言语和书写都能激活共同的代码。在使用句子材料的过程中，我们的目的是找出假设的超模态系统的位置以及它如何对理解挑战做出反应。为了探究这些问题，我们在有经验的读者进行语义分类任务时，检查了他们的大脑活动，这些任务使用的是匹配的书面或口头句子，这些句子要么形式正确，要么包含句法形式或语用内容的异常。在全脑扫描中，两种异常情况都增加了异常句子相对于正常句子的净激活，主要是在左额颞部的异模态皮质。异常敏感的部位与以前的研究（Michael 等人，2001 年；Constable 等人，2004 年）发现的对句子复杂性（宾语先行与主语先行）的其他差异敏感的部位大致相同。感兴趣区域（ROIs）是通过对模态条件下异常的平均峰值反应来定义的。每个异常敏感的 ROI 在每种模态的句子类型中都表现出相同的反应模式。基于余弦相似性函数的全脑体素级探索证实了超模态区域的特异性。
