Department of Language Sciences, Tokyo Metropolitan University, 1-1 Minami-Osawa, Hachioji, Tokyo 192-0397, Japan.
Neurosci Lett. 2011 Aug 26;501(2):72-7. doi: 10.1016/j.neulet.2011.06.044. Epub 2011 Jun 29.
The relationship between 2 words is judged by the meanings of words. Here, we examined how the semantic relatedness of words is structured in each individual brain. During measurements of event-related potentials (ERPs), participants performed semantic-relatedness judgments of word pairs. For each participant, we divided word pairs into 2 groups--related and unrelated pairs--and compared their ERPs. All of the participants showed a significant N400 effect. However, when we applied an identical grouping of pairs, this effect was observed only in half the number of the participants. These results show that our single-subject analysis of N400 extracted semantic relatedness of words in the individual brain. Future studies using this analysis will clarify the organization of the mental lexicon.
这两个词之间的关系是通过词义来判断的。在这里，我们研究了单词的语义相关性是如何在每个人的大脑中构建的。在进行事件相关电位 (ERP) 测量时，参与者对词对进行语义相关性判断。对于每个参与者，我们将词对分为两组——相关词对和不相关词对，并比较它们的 ERP。所有参与者都表现出显著的 N400 效应。然而，当我们采用相同的词对分组时，这种效应仅在一半的参与者中观察到。这些结果表明，我们对 N400 的单被试分析提取了个体大脑中单词的语义相关性。未来使用这种分析的研究将阐明心理词汇的组织。
