Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands ; Department of Paediatrics, Maastricht University Medical Centre, Maastricht, The Netherlands.
Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands ; Institute of Research in Psychology, Institute of Neuroscience, Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium ; Maastricht Brain Imaging Center (M-BIC), Maastricht, The Netherlands.
PLoS One. 2013 Dec 20;8(12):e82884. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0082884. eCollection 2013.
During sentence production, linguistic information (semantics, syntax, phonology) of words is retrieved and assembled into a meaningful utterance. There is still debate on how we assemble single words into more complex syntactic structures such as noun phrases or sentences. In the present study, event-related potentials (ERPs) were used to investigate the time course of syntactic planning. Thirty-three volunteers described visually animated scenes using naming formats varying in syntactic complexity: from simple words ('W', e.g., "triangle", "red", "square", "green", "to fly towards"), to noun phrases ('NP', e.g., "the red triangle", "the green square", "to fly towards"), to a sentence ('S', e.g., "The red triangle flies towards the green square."). Behaviourally, we observed an increase in errors and corrections with increasing syntactic complexity, indicating a successful experimental manipulation. In the ERPs following scene onset, syntactic complexity variations were found in a P300-like component ('S'/'NP'>'W') and a fronto-central negativity (linear increase with syntactic complexity). In addition, the scene could display two actions - unpredictable for the participant, as the disambiguation occurred only later in the animation. Time-locked to the moment of visual disambiguation of the action and thus the verb, we observed another P300 component ('S'>'NP'/'W'). The data show for the first time evidence of sensitivity to syntactic planning within the P300 time window, time-locked to visual events critical of syntactic planning. We discuss the findings in the light of current syntactic planning views.
在句子生成过程中，语言信息（语义、语法、音韵）从词汇中被检索并组合成有意义的话语。关于我们如何将单个单词组合成更复杂的句法结构，如名词短语或句子，仍然存在争议。在本研究中，我们使用事件相关电位（ERP）来研究句法规划的时间进程。33 名志愿者使用命名格式描述视觉动画场景，命名格式的句法复杂度不同：从简单的单词（例如“三角形”、“红色”、“正方形”、“绿色”、“飞向”）到名词短语（例如“红色三角形”、“绿色正方形”、“飞向”）再到句子（例如“红色三角形飞向绿色正方形”）。行为上，我们观察到随着句法复杂度的增加，错误和纠正的数量增加，这表明实验操作是成功的。在场景开始后的 ERP 中，我们发现 P300 样成分（“S”/“NP”>“W”）和额中央负性（随句法复杂度线性增加）存在句法复杂度变化。此外，场景可以显示两个动作——对于参与者来说是不可预测的，因为只有在动画的后期才能消除歧义。与动作的视觉消除时间锁定，也就是动词，我们观察到另一个 P300 成分（“S”>“NP”/“W”）。数据首次表明，在 P300 时间窗口内对句法规划具有敏感性，与句法规划关键的视觉事件锁定。我们根据当前的句法规划观点讨论了这些发现。
