Department of Psychology, Peking University Beijing, China ; Center for Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Peking University Beijing, China.
Front Hum Neurosci. 2013 Nov 21;7:753. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00753. eCollection 2013.
Compound words make up a major part of modern Chinese vocabulary. Behavioral studies have demonstrated that access to lexical semantics of compound words is driven by the interaction between orthographic and phonological information. However, little is known about the neural underpinnings of compound word processing. In this functional magnetic resonance imaging study, we asked participants to perform lexical decisions to pseudohomophones, which were constructed by replacing one or both constituents of two-character compound words with orthographically dissimilar homophonic characters. Mixed pseudohomophones, which shared the first constituent with the base words, were more difficult to reject than non-pseudohomophone non-words. This effect was accompanied by the increased activation of bilateral inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), left inferior parietal lobule (IPL), and left angular gyrus. The pure pseudohomophones, which shared no constituent with their base words, were rejected as quickly as non-word controls and did not elicit any significant neural activation. The effective connectivity of a phonological pathway from left IPL to left IFG was enhanced for the mixed pseudohomophones but not for pure pseudohomophones. These findings demonstrated that phonological activation alone, as in the case of the pure pseudohomophones, is not sufficient to drive access to lexical representations of compound words, and that orthographic information interacts with phonology, playing a gating role in the recognition of Chinese compound words.
复合词构成了现代汉语词汇的主要部分。行为研究表明，复合词词汇语义的获取是由字形和语音信息的相互作用驱动的。然而，对于复合词处理的神经基础知之甚少。在这项功能磁共振成像研究中，我们要求参与者对假同音字进行词汇判断，这些假同音字是通过用字形上相似的同音字符替换两个字符复合词的一个或两个组成部分来构建的。与基词共享第一个组成部分的混合假同音字比非假同音字非词更难被拒绝。这种效应伴随着双侧额下回（IFG）、左顶下小叶（IPL）和左角回的激活增加。与基词没有共同组成部分的纯假同音字与非词控制一样被快速拒绝，没有引起任何显著的神经激活。来自左 IPL 到左 IFG 的语音通路的有效连接对于混合假同音字增强，但对于纯假同音字则没有。这些发现表明，单纯的语音激活（如纯假同音字的情况）不足以驱动对复合词词汇表示的访问，并且字形信息与语音相互作用，在识别汉语复合词时起着门控作用。
