Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge, United Kingdom.
J Cogn Neurosci. 2012 Jun;24(6):1492-509. doi: 10.1162/jocn_a_00219. Epub 2012 Mar 5.
Word meaning processing in the brain involves ventrolateral temporal cortex, but a semantic contribution of the dorsal stream, especially frontocentral sensorimotor areas, has been controversial. We here examine brain activation during passive reading of object-related nouns from different semantic categories, notably animal, food, and tool words, matched for a range of psycholinguistic features. Results show ventral stream activation in temporal cortex along with category-specific activation patterns in both ventral and dorsal streams, including sensorimotor systems and adjacent pFC. Precentral activation reflected action-related semantic features of the word categories. Cortical regions implicated in mouth and face movements were sparked by food words, and hand area activation was seen for tool words, consistent with the actions implicated by the objects the words are used to speak about. Furthermore, tool words specifically activated the right cerebellum, and food words activated the left orbito-frontal and fusiform areas. We discuss our results in the context of category-specific semantic deficits in the processing of words and concepts, along with previous neuroimaging research, and conclude that specific dorsal and ventral areas in frontocentral and temporal cortex index visual and affective-emotional semantic attributes of object-related nouns and action-related affordances of their referent objects.
大脑中的单词意义处理涉及腹外侧颞叶皮质，但背侧流（特别是额中感觉运动区）的语义贡献一直存在争议。我们在这里检查了在被动阅读来自不同语义类别的物体相关名词时大脑的激活情况，这些名词包括动物、食物和工具词，它们在一系列心理语言特征上相匹配。结果显示，腹侧流在颞叶皮质中激活，同时在腹侧和背侧流中都出现了特定于类别的激活模式，包括感觉运动系统和相邻的额前皮质。中央前回的激活反映了这些词类与动作相关的语义特征。与食物词相关的口腔和面部运动的皮质区域被触发，而工具词则激活了手部区域，这与这些词所指代的物体的动作相对应。此外，工具词特异性地激活了右侧小脑，而食物词则激活了左侧眶额和梭状回区域。我们在处理单词和概念的特定语义缺陷的背景下讨论了我们的结果，以及之前的神经影像学研究，并得出结论，额中和颞叶皮质中的特定背侧和腹侧区域索引了与物体相关的名词的视觉和情感语义属性，以及它们所指物体的动作相关的功能。
