Dikker Suzanne, Silbert Lauren J, Hasson Uri, Zevin Jason D
Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology, Weill Cornell Medical College, New York, New York 10065, Department of Psychology and Princeton Neuroscience Institute, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08540, Haskins Laboratories, New Haven, Connecticut 06511, New York University, Department of Psychology, New York, New York 10003, and Utrecht University, Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS, 3512 JK Utrecht, The Netherlands.
J Neurosci. 2014 Apr 30;34(18):6267-72. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3796-13.2014.
Recent research has shown that the degree to which speakers and listeners exhibit similar brain activity patterns during human linguistic interaction is correlated with communicative success. Here, we used an intersubject correlation approach in fMRI to test the hypothesis that a listener's ability to predict a speaker's utterance increases such neural coupling between speakers and listeners. Nine subjects listened to recordings of a speaker describing visual scenes that varied in the degree to which they permitted specific linguistic predictions. In line with our hypothesis, the temporal profile of listeners' brain activity was significantly more synchronous with the speaker's brain activity for highly predictive contexts in left posterior superior temporal gyrus (pSTG), an area previously associated with predictive auditory language processing. In this region, predictability differentially affected the temporal profiles of brain responses in the speaker and listeners respectively, in turn affecting correlated activity between the two: whereas pSTG activation increased with predictability in the speaker, listeners' pSTG activity instead decreased for more predictable sentences. Listeners additionally showed stronger BOLD responses for predictive images before sentence onset, suggesting that highly predictable contexts lead comprehenders to preactivate predicted words.
近期研究表明，在人类语言交互过程中，说话者和倾听者表现出相似大脑活动模式的程度与交流成功与否相关。在此，我们运用功能磁共振成像（fMRI）中的受试者间相关性方法，来检验这样一个假设：倾听者预测说话者话语的能力会增强说话者与倾听者之间的这种神经耦合。九名受试者聆听了一位说话者描述视觉场景的录音，这些场景在允许进行特定语言预测的程度上有所不同。与我们的假设一致，在左后颞上回（pSTG）这个先前与预测性听觉语言处理相关的区域，对于具有高度预测性的情境，倾听者大脑活动的时间特征与说话者的大脑活动显著更同步。在这个区域，可预测性分别以不同方式影响了说话者和倾听者大脑反应的时间特征，进而影响两者之间的相关活动：虽然说话者的pSTG激活随着可预测性增加，而对于更具可预测性的句子，倾听者的pSTG活动反而减少。倾听者在句子开始之前对具有预测性的图像还表现出更强的血氧水平依赖（BOLD）反应，这表明高度可预测的情境会使理解者预先激活预测的词汇。
