Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology, Weill Cornell Medical College, NY, USA; New York University, Department of Psychology, NY, USA.
Brain Lang. 2013 Oct;127(1):55-64. doi: 10.1016/j.bandl.2012.08.004. Epub 2012 Oct 2.
It is widely assumed that prediction plays a substantial role in language processing. However, despite numerous studies demonstrating that contextual information facilitates both syntactic and lexical-semantic processing, there exists no direct evidence pertaining to the neural correlates of the prediction process itself. Using magnetoencephalography (MEG), this study found that brain activity was modulated by whether or not a specific noun could be predicted, given a picture prime. Specifically, before the noun was presented, predictive contexts triggered enhanced activation in left mid-temporal cortex (implicated in lexical access), ventro-medial prefrontal cortex (previously associated with top-down processing), and visual cortex (hypothesized to index the preactivation of predicted form features), successively. This finding suggests that predictive language processing recruits a top-down network where predicted words are activated at different levels of representation, from more 'abstract' lexical-semantic representations in temporal cortex, all the way down to visual word form features. The same brain regions that exhibited enhanced activation for predictive contexts before the onset of the noun showed effects of congruence during the target word. To our knowledge, this study is one of the first to directly investigate the anticipatory stage of predictive language processing.
人们普遍认为，预测在语言处理中起着重要作用。然而，尽管有许多研究表明语境信息促进了句法和词汇语义处理，但目前还没有直接证据表明预测过程本身的神经相关性。本研究使用脑磁图（MEG）发现，特定名词是否可以根据图片提示进行预测，这会调节大脑活动。具体来说，在名词呈现之前，预测语境会引发左中颞叶皮层（涉及词汇获取）、腹内侧前额叶皮层（先前与自上而下的加工有关）和视觉皮层的激活增强，依次进行。这一发现表明，预测性语言处理涉及一个自上而下的网络，其中预测词在不同的表示水平上被激活，从颞叶中更“抽象”的词汇语义表示，一直到视觉单词形式特征。在名词出现之前，预测语境增强激活的相同脑区在目标词出现时也表现出了一致性效应。据我们所知，这项研究是首次直接研究预测性语言处理的预期阶段。
