Nagels Arne, Kauschke Christina, Schrauf Judith, Whitney Carin, Straube Benjamin, Kircher Tilo
Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Philipps-University Marburg Marburg, Germany.
Front Behav Neurosci. 2013 Sep 19;7:121. doi: 10.3389/fnbeh.2013.00121. eCollection 2013.
Many figurative expressions are fully conventionalized in everyday speech. Regarding the neural basis of figurative language processing, research has predominantly focused on metaphoric expressions in minimal semantic context. It remains unclear in how far metaphoric expressions during continuous text comprehension activate similar neural networks as isolated metaphors. We therefore investigated the processing of similes (figurative language, e.g., "He smokes like a chimney!") occurring in a short story. Sixteen healthy, male, native German speakers listened to similes that came about naturally in a short story, while blood-oxygenation-level-dependent (BOLD) responses were measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). For the event-related analysis, similes were contrasted with non-figurative control sentences (CS). The stimuli differed with respect to figurativeness, while they were matched for frequency of words, number of syllables, plausibility, and comprehensibility. Similes contrasted with CS resulted in enhanced BOLD responses in the left inferior (IFG) and adjacent middle frontal gyrus. Concrete CS as compared to similes activated the bilateral middle temporal gyri as well as the right precuneus and the left middle frontal gyrus (LMFG). Activation of the left IFG for similes in a short story is consistent with results on single sentence metaphor processing. The findings strengthen the importance of the left inferior frontal region in the processing of abstract figurative speech during continuous, ecologically-valid speech comprehension; the processing of concrete semantic contents goes along with a down-regulation of bilateral temporal regions.
许多比喻性表达在日常言语中已完全常规化。关于比喻性语言处理的神经基础，研究主要集中在最小语义语境中的隐喻表达上。在连续文本理解过程中，隐喻表达在多大程度上激活与孤立隐喻相似的神经网络仍不清楚。因此，我们研究了短篇小说中明喻（比喻性语言，例如“He smokes like a chimney!”）的处理。16名以德语为母语的健康男性聆听了短篇小说中自然出现的明喻，同时通过功能磁共振成像（fMRI）测量血氧水平依赖（BOLD）反应。对于事件相关分析，将明喻与非比喻性对照句子（CS）进行对比。刺激在比喻性方面存在差异，而在单词频率、音节数量、合理性和可理解性方面进行了匹配。与CS对比，明喻在左侧额下回（IFG）和相邻的额中回导致BOLD反应增强。与明喻相比，具体的CS激活了双侧颞中回以及右侧楔前叶和左侧额中回（LMFG）。短篇小说中明喻对左侧IFG的激活与单句隐喻处理的结果一致。这些发现强化了左侧额下区域在连续、生态有效的言语理解过程中处理抽象比喻性言语的重要性；具体语义内容的处理伴随着双侧颞叶区域的下调。
