Brain Imaging and Modeling Section, National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA.
Brain Res. 2012 Oct 10;1478:24-35. doi: 10.1016/j.brainres.2012.08.029. Epub 2012 Aug 23.
Emblems are meaningful, culturally-specific hand gestures that are analogous to words. In this fMRI study, we contrasted the processing of emblematic gestures with meaningless gestures by pre-lingually Deaf and hearing participants. Deaf participants, who used American Sign Language, activated bilateral auditory processing and associative areas in the temporal cortex to a greater extent than the hearing participants while processing both types of gestures relative to rest. The hearing non-signers activated a diverse set of regions, including those implicated in the mirror neuron system, such as premotor cortex (BA 6) and inferior parietal lobule (BA 40) for the same contrast. Further, when contrasting the processing of meaningful to meaningless gestures (both relative to rest), the Deaf participants, but not the hearing, showed greater response in the left angular and supramarginal gyri, regions that play important roles in linguistic processing. These results suggest that whereas the signers interpreted emblems to be comparable to words, the non-signers treated emblems as similar to pictorial descriptions of the world and engaged the mirror neuron system.
符号是具有特定文化意义的手势，类似于词语。在这项 fMRI 研究中，我们对比了聋人和听力正常参与者对有意义手势和无意义手势的处理。使用美国手语的聋人参与者在处理这两种手势时，相对于休息状态，其双侧颞叶听觉处理和联想区域的激活程度大于听力正常参与者。而听力正常的非手语使用者则激活了一系列不同的区域，包括与镜像神经元系统相关的区域，如运动前皮层（BA6）和下顶叶（BA40）。此外，当对比有意义手势和无意义手势的处理（均相对于休息状态）时，只有聋人参与者而不是听力正常参与者，在左角回和缘上回显示出更大的反应，这些区域在语言处理中起着重要作用。这些结果表明，手语使用者将符号解释为与词语相当，而非手语使用者则将符号视为对世界的图像描述，并激活了镜像神经元系统。
