Radboud University Nijmegen, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Neuroimage. 2011 Feb 1;54(3):2350-63. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2010.10.022. Epub 2010 Oct 16.
The monitoring theory of language perception proposes that competing representations that are caused by strong expectancy violations can trigger a conflict which elicits reprocessing of the input to check for possible processing errors. This monitoring process is thought to be reflected by the P600 component in the EEG. The present study further investigated this monitoring process by comparing syntactic and spelling violations in an EEG and an fMRI experiment. To assess the effect of conflict strength, misspellings were embedded in sentences that were weakly or strongly predictive of a critical word. In support of the monitoring theory, syntactic and spelling violations elicited similarly distributed P600 effects. Furthermore, the P600 effect was larger to misspellings in the strongly compared to the weakly predictive sentences. The fMRI results showed that both syntactic and spelling violations increased activation in the left inferior frontal gyrus (lIFG), while only the misspellings activated additional areas. Conflict strength did not affect the hemodynamic response to spelling violations. These results extend the idea that the lIFG is involved in implementing cognitive control in the presence of representational conflicts in general to the processing of errors in language perception.
语言感知监测理论提出，强烈的预期违背所导致的竞争表征可能引发冲突，从而引发对输入的重新处理，以检查是否存在可能的处理错误。这种监测过程被认为反映在 EEG 中的 P600 成分中。本研究通过在 EEG 和 fMRI 实验中比较句法和拼写错误进一步研究了这种监测过程。为了评估冲突强度的影响，将拼写错误嵌入到对关键单词弱或强预测的句子中。支持监测理论的是，句法和拼写错误引发了类似分布的 P600 效应。此外，在强预测句子中，拼写错误比在弱预测句子中产生的 P600 效应更大。fMRI 结果表明，句法和拼写错误都会增加左额下回（lIFG）的激活，而只有拼写错误会激活额外的区域。冲突强度不会影响拼写错误的血流动力学反应。这些结果将 lIFG 参与在存在代表性冲突的情况下实施认知控制的想法扩展到语言感知中错误的处理。
