Department of Psychology and Princeton Neuroscience Institute, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08540.
J Neurosci. 2013 Oct 2;33(40):15978-88. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1580-13.2013.
Linguistic content can be conveyed both in speech and in writing. But how similar is the neural processing when the same real-life information is presented in spoken and written form? Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we recorded neural responses from human subjects who either listened to a 7 min spoken narrative or read a time-locked presentation of its transcript. Next, within each brain area, we directly compared the response time courses elicited by the written and spoken narrative. Early visual areas responded selectively to the written version, and early auditory areas to the spoken version of the narrative. In addition, many higher-order parietal and frontal areas demonstrated strong selectivity, responding far more reliably to either the spoken or written form of the narrative. By contrast, the response time courses along the superior temporal gyrus and inferior frontal gyrus were remarkably similar for spoken and written narratives, indicating strong modality-invariance of linguistic processing in these circuits. These results suggest that our ability to extract the same information from spoken and written forms arises from a mixture of selective neural processes in early (perceptual) and high-order (control) areas, and modality-invariant responses in linguistic and extra-linguistic areas.
语言内容既可以通过口语表达，也可以通过书面形式传达。但是，当相同的真实信息以口语和书面形式呈现时，神经处理过程有多么相似呢？我们使用功能磁共振成像技术，记录了人类受试者的神经反应，这些受试者要么听了一段 7 分钟的口语叙述，要么阅读了与其时间锁定的文本。接下来，我们在每个大脑区域内，直接比较了书面和口语叙述引起的反应时间过程。早期视觉区域对书面版本有选择性反应，而早期听觉区域对叙述的口语版本有选择性反应。此外，许多高级顶叶和额叶区域表现出强烈的选择性，对叙述的口语或书面形式的反应更为可靠。相比之下，沿着颞上回和额下回的反应时间过程在口语和书面叙述中非常相似，这表明这些回路中的语言处理具有很强的模态不变性。这些结果表明，我们从口语和书面形式中提取相同信息的能力源于早期（感知）和高级（控制）区域中选择性神经过程的混合，以及语言和非语言区域中的模态不变响应。
