Department of Psychiatry, University of Tuebingen, Osianderstrasse 26, 72076 Tuebingen, Germany.
Brain Lang. 2011 Dec;119(3):196-205. doi: 10.1016/j.bandl.2011.07.004. Epub 2011 Sep 1.
Metonymies are exemplary models for complex semantic association processes at the sentence level. We investigated processing of metonymies using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). During an 1.5Tesla fMRI scan, 14 healthy subjects (12 female) read 124 short German sentences with either literal (like "Africa is arid"), metonymic ("Africa is hungry"), or nonsense ("Africa is woollen") content. Sentences were constructed so that they obey certain grammatical, semantic, and plausibility conditions and were matched for word frequency, semantic association, length and syntactic structure. We concentrated on metonymies that were not yet fossilised; we also examined a wide variety of metonymic readings. Reading metonymies relative to literal sentences revealed signal changes in a predominantly left-lateralised fronto-temporal network with maxima in the left and right inferior frontal as well as left middle temporal gyri. Left inferior frontal activation may reflect both inference processes and access to world knowledge during metonymy resolution.
转喻是句子层面上复杂语义联想过程的典范模型。我们使用事件相关功能磁共振成像（fMRI）研究了转喻的处理。在 1.5 特斯拉 fMRI 扫描期间，14 名健康受试者（12 名女性）阅读了 124 个带有字面（如“非洲是干旱的”）、转喻（如“非洲是饥饿的”）或无意义（如“非洲是羊毛的”）内容的短德语句子。句子的构建符合某些语法、语义和合理性条件，并匹配了词频、语义关联、长度和句法结构。我们专注于尚未僵化的转喻；我们还检查了各种各样的转喻解读。与字面句子相比，阅读转喻会导致信号在以左额颞为主的额颞网络中发生变化，左、右额下回以及左颞中回的活动达到最大值。左侧额下回的激活可能反映了推理过程和在转喻解决过程中访问世界知识。
