Dipartimento di Psicologia, Università di Milano-Bicocca, Milano, Italy.
Neuropsychologia. 2010 Dec;48(14):4003-11. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2010.10.019. Epub 2010 Oct 20.
The specific role of the phonological loop in sentence comprehension is still a matter of debate. We tested the behavioural consequences of activity disruption in left BA40 and BA44, key regions of the phonological loop, on language comprehension using 1Hz rTMS. Comprehension was assessed by means of two tasks: a sentence-to-picture matching task, with sentences varying in length and syntactic complexity (Experiment 1), and a sentence verification task (Experiment 2). rTMS over left BA40 significantly reduced accuracy for syntactically complex sentences and long, but syntactically simpler sentences, while rTMS over left BA44 significantly reduced accuracy only for syntactically complex sentences. rTMS applied over left BA40 also impaired performance on sentences in which word order was crucial. We suggest that the neural correlates of the phonological loop, left BA40 and BA44, are both involved in the comprehension of syntactically complex sentences, while only left BA40, corresponding to the short-term store, is recruited for the comprehension of long but syntactically simple sentences. Therefore, in contrast with the dominant view, we showed that sentence comprehension is a function of the phonological loop.
语音回路在句子理解中的具体作用仍存在争议。我们使用 1Hz rTMS 测试了语音回路关键区域左 BA40 和 BA44 的活动中断对语言理解的行为后果。使用两种任务评估理解：句子到图片匹配任务，句子长度和句法复杂度不同（实验 1），以及句子验证任务（实验 2）。左 BA40 的 rTMS 显著降低了句法复杂句子和长但句法简单句子的准确性，而左 BA44 的 rTMS 仅显著降低了句法复杂句子的准确性。左 BA40 上的 rTMS 也会损害语序至关重要的句子的表现。我们认为，语音回路的神经相关物，左 BA40 和 BA44，都参与了句法复杂句子的理解，而仅左 BA40（对应于短期存储）被招募用于理解长但句法简单的句子。因此，与主流观点相反，我们表明句子理解是语音回路的功能。
