Departamento de Psicología Cognitiva, Facultad de Psicología, Universidad de La Laguna, Campus de Guajara, La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain.
Brain Res. 2013 Aug 14;1526:71-83. doi: 10.1016/j.brainres.2013.06.020. Epub 2013 Jun 21.
This ERP study explores the brain's response to the manipulation of motor compatibility in action-related language. In Experiment 1 participants read sentences in which a protagonist performed two different manual actions either simultaneously or consecutively (e.g. While/after cleaning the wound he unrolled the bandage…). The ERPs were measured in the second-clause verb (e.g. unrolled) and noun (e.g. bandage). Notably, only the noun showed compatibility effects, namely a larger N400 in the simultaneous (incompatible) version than in the consecutive (compatible) version, suggesting that readers need to integrate the meaning of the whole sentence to evaluate the feasibility of the actions. In Experiment 2, motor compatibility was manipulated in a different way: all the sentences described the protagonist as performing two simultaneous actions that were both manual (While cleaning the wound he unrolled the bandage), or one action that was perceptual and the other manual (While looking at the wound he unrolled the bandage). The N400 effects for the former incompatible condition were replicated, again in the second-clause noun. The results demonstrated that readers of action language employ their pragmatic world knowledge to test the feasibility of motor actions, taking into account the embodied constraints of such actions.
这项 ERP 研究探讨了大脑对动作相关语言中运动兼容性操作的反应。在实验 1 中，参与者阅读了这样的句子，其中主角同时或连续执行了两种不同的手动动作（例如，在/之后清洁伤口时，他展开了绷带……）。在第二从句动词（例如，unrolled）和名词（例如，bandage）中测量了 ERP。值得注意的是，只有名词显示出兼容性效应，即在同时（不兼容）版本中比在连续（兼容）版本中 N400 更大，这表明读者需要整合整个句子的含义来评估动作的可行性。在实验 2 中，以不同的方式操纵了运动兼容性：所有句子都描述了主角同时执行两个手动动作（例如，在清洁伤口时他展开了绷带），或者一个动作是感知的，另一个动作是手动的（例如，在查看伤口时他展开了绷带）。前一种不兼容条件的 N400 效应再次在第二从句名词中得到复制。结果表明，动作语言的读者利用他们的语用世界知识来测试运动动作的可行性，同时考虑到这些动作的体现约束。
