Tune Sarah, Schlesewsky Matthias, Small Steven L, Sanford Anthony J, Bohan Jason, Sassenhagen Jona, Bornkessel-Schlesewsky Ina
Department of Germanic Linguistics, University of Marburg, Deutschhausstrasse 3, 35032 Marburg, Germany.
Department of English and Linguistics, Johannes Gutenberg-University, Mainz, Germany.
Neuropsychologia. 2014 Apr;56:147-66. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2014.01.007. Epub 2014 Jan 18.
The N400 event-related brain potential (ERP) has played a major role in the examination of how the human brain processes meaning. For current theories of the N400, classes of semantic inconsistencies which do not elicit N400 effects have proven particularly influential. Semantic anomalies that are difficult to detect are a case in point ("borderline anomalies", e.g. "After an air crash, where should the survivors be buried?"), engendering a late positive ERP response but no N400 effect in English (Sanford, Leuthold, Bohan, & Sanford, 2011). In three auditory ERP experiments, we demonstrate that this result is subject to cross-linguistic variation. In a German version of Sanford and colleagues' experiment (Experiment 1), detected borderline anomalies elicited both N400 and late positivity effects compared to control stimuli or to missed borderline anomalies. Classic easy-to-detect semantic (non-borderline) anomalies showed the same pattern as in English (N400 plus late positivity). The cross-linguistic difference in the response to borderline anomalies was replicated in two additional studies with a slightly modified task (Experiment 2a: German; Experiment 2b: English), with a reliable LANGUAGE×ANOMALY interaction for the borderline anomalies confirming that the N400 effect is subject to systematic cross-linguistic variation. We argue that this variation results from differences in the language-specific default weighting of top-down and bottom-up information, concluding that N400 amplitude reflects the interaction between the two information sources in the form-to-meaning mapping.
N400事件相关脑电位（ERP）在研究人类大脑如何处理语义方面发挥了重要作用。对于当前的N400理论而言，那些不会引发N400效应的语义不一致类别已被证明具有特别重要的影响力。难以察觉的语义异常就是一个恰当的例子（“临界异常”，例如“空难发生后，幸存者应该被埋在哪里？”），在英语中会引发晚期正向ERP反应，但不会产生N400效应（桑福德、勒特霍尔德、博汉和桑福德，2011）。在三项听觉ERP实验中，我们证明了这一结果存在跨语言差异。在桑福德及其同事实验的德语版本中（实验1），与对照刺激或未被察觉的临界异常相比，被察觉的临界异常既引发了N400效应，也引发了晚期正向效应。典型的易于察觉的语义（非临界）异常表现出与英语相同的模式（N400加上晚期正向效应）。在另外两项任务稍有修改的研究中（实验2a：德语；实验2b：英语），对临界异常反应的跨语言差异得到了重复验证，临界异常的可靠的语言×异常交互作用证实了N400效应存在系统性的跨语言差异。我们认为这种差异是由自上而下和自下而上信息在特定语言中的默认权重差异导致的，并得出结论：N400波幅以形式到意义映射的形式反映了这两种信息源之间的相互作用。
