Department of Psychology, New York University New York, NY, USA.
Department of Psychology, New York University New York, NY, USA ; Department of Linguistics, New York University New York, NY, USA ; NYU Abu Dhabi Institute, New York University Abu Dhabi Abu Dhabi, UAE.
Front Psychol. 2014 Jun 4;5:524. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00524. eCollection 2014.
The left anterior temporal lobe (LATL) has risen as a leading candidate for a brain locus of composition in language; yet the computational details of its function are unknown. Although most literature discusses it as a combinatory region in very general terms, it has also been proposed to reflect the more specific function of conceptual combination, which in the classic use of this term mainly pertains to the combination of open class words with obvious conceptual contributions. We aimed to distinguish between these two possibilities by contrasting plural nouns in contexts where they were either preceded by a color modifier ("red cups"), eliciting conceptual combination, or by a number word ("two cups"), eliciting numeral quantification but no conceptual combination. This contrast was chosen because within a production task, it allows the manipulation of composition type while keeping the physical stimulus constant: a display of two red cups can be named as "two cups" or "red cups" depending on the task instruction. These utterances were compared to productions of two-word number and color lists, intended as non-combinatory control conditions. Magnetoencephalography activity was recorded during the planning for production, prior to motion artifacts. As expected on the basis of comprehension studies, color modification elicited increased LATL activity as compared to color lists, demonstrating that this basic combinatory effect is strongly crossmodal. However, numeral quantification did not elicit a parallel effect, suggesting that the function of the LATL is (i) semantic and not syntactic (given that both color modification and numeral quantification involve syntactic composition) and (ii) corresponds more closely to the classical psychological notion of conceptual combination as opposed to a more general semantic combinatory function.
左前颞叶（LATL）作为语言构成的主要候选脑区之一而备受关注；然而，其功能的计算细节尚不清楚。尽管大多数文献都以非常笼统的术语讨论它是一个组合区域，但它也被提出反映了概念组合的更具体功能，在这个术语的经典用法中，概念组合主要涉及具有明显概念贡献的开放类词的组合。我们旨在通过对比在两种语境下的复数名词来区分这两种可能性，一种语境下名词前有颜色修饰语（“red cups”，红色杯子），可以引发概念组合，另一种语境下名词前有数字词（“two cups”，两个杯子），可以引发数字量化但没有概念组合。之所以选择这种对比，是因为在生成任务中，它可以在保持物理刺激不变的情况下，操纵组合类型：在一个显示两个红色杯子的屏幕上，可以根据任务指令将其命名为“two cups”或“red cups”。这些话语与两个单词的数字和颜色列表的生成进行了比较，这些列表被用作非组合性的控制条件。在运动伪影之前，在计划生成期间记录了脑磁图活动。基于理解研究的预期，颜色修饰比颜色列表引起了左前颞叶更高的活动，这表明这种基本的组合效应是强烈的跨模态的。然而，数字量化并没有引起类似的效应，这表明 LATL 的功能是（i）语义的，而不是句法的（因为颜色修饰和数字量化都涉及句法组合），（ii）更接近经典的心理概念组合概念，而不是更一般的语义组合功能。
