Department of Neurology, Medical College of Wisconsin, United States.
Brain Lang. 2013 Oct;127(1):65-74. doi: 10.1016/j.bandl.2012.07.008. Epub 2012 Aug 19.
The problem of how word meaning is processed in the brain has been a topic of intense investigation in cognitive neuroscience. While considerable correlational evidence exists for the involvement of sensory-motor systems in conceptual processing, it is still unclear whether they play a causal role. We investigated this issue by comparing the performance of patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) with that of age-matched controls when processing action and abstract verbs. To examine the effects of task demands, we used tasks in which semantic demands were either implicit (lexical decision and priming) or explicit (semantic similarity judgment). In both tasks, PD patients' performance was selectively impaired for action verbs (relative to controls), indicating that the motor system plays a more central role in the processing of action verbs than in the processing of abstract verbs. These results argue for a causal role of sensory-motor systems in semantic processing.
大脑如何处理单词意义的问题一直是认知神经科学中一个备受关注的研究课题。虽然有大量相关证据表明感觉运动系统参与了概念处理，但它们是否起因果作用仍不清楚。我们通过比较帕金森病 (PD) 患者和年龄匹配的对照组在处理动作动词和抽象动词时的表现来研究这个问题。为了检验任务需求的影响，我们使用了语义需求分别为内隐（词汇判断和启动）和外显（语义相似性判断）的任务。在这两个任务中，PD 患者的动作动词表现（相对于对照组）都受到了选择性的损害，这表明运动系统在处理动作动词时比在处理抽象动词时发挥了更核心的作用。这些结果表明感觉运动系统在语义处理中起因果作用。
