Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Department of Language and Communication, VU University, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; The Eargroup, Herentalsebaan 75, B-2100 Antwerp-Deurne, Belgium.
Neuropsychologia. 2014 May;58:64-74. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2014.03.017. Epub 2014 Apr 12.
In this fMRI study we investigate the neural correlates of information structure integration during sentence comprehension in Dutch. We looked into how prosodic cues (pitch accents) that signal the information status of constituents to the listener (new information) are combined with other types of information during the unification process. The difficulty of unifying the prosodic cues into overall sentence meaning was manipulated by constructing sentences in which the pitch accent did (focus-accent agreement), and sentences in which the pitch accent did not (focus-accent disagreement) match the expectations for focus constituents of the sentence. In case of a mismatch, the load on unification processes increases. Our results show two anatomically distinct effects of focus-accent disagreement, one located in the posterior left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG, BA6/44), and one in the more anterior-ventral LIFG (BA 47/45). Our results confirm that information structure is taken into account during unification, and imply an important role for the LIFG in unification processes, in line with previous fMRI studies.
在这项 fMRI 研究中，我们调查了荷兰语句子理解过程中信息结构整合的神经相关性。我们研究了在统一过程中，如何将提示成分信息状态的韵律线索（音高重音）与其他类型的信息结合起来（音高重音）。通过构建音高重音与句子焦点成分的预期相符（焦点一致）和不相符（焦点不一致）的句子，来操纵将韵律线索统一为整体句子意义的难度。在不匹配的情况下，统一过程的负载会增加。我们的结果显示了焦点不一致的两个解剖学上不同的影响，一个位于左后下额下回（LIFG，BA6/44），另一个位于更前腹侧的 LIFG（BA47/45）。我们的结果证实了在统一过程中考虑了信息结构，并暗示了 LIFG 在统一过程中的重要作用，这与之前的 fMRI 研究一致。
