Sassenhagen Jona, Bornkessel-Schlesewsky Ina
Department of Germanic Linguistics, University of Marburg, Marburg, Germany; Department of Psychology, University of Frankfurt, Germany.
School of Psychology, Social Work and Social Policy, University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia; Department of Germanic Linguistics, University of Marburg, Marburg, Germany.
Cortex. 2015 May;66:A3-A20. doi: 10.1016/j.cortex.2014.12.019. Epub 2015 Feb 13.
When, during language processing, a reader or listener is confronted with a structurally deviant phrase, this typically elicits a late positive ERP deflection (P600). The P600 is often understood as a correlate of structural analysis. This assumption has informed a number of neurocognitive models of language. However, the P600 strongly resembles the P3, likely a more general electrophysiological correlate of reorientation behaviour supported by noradrenergic input to the ventral attention network/VAN. Some researchers have proposed that the P600 is an instance of the P3, not a distinct component reflecting the analysis of structured inputs. Here, we tested the P600-as-P3 hypothesis by estimating the alignment of the P600 elicited in a visual sentence processing task to simultaneously collected behavioural measures. A similar analysis was undertaken for a P3 elicited in a separate non-linguistic (face detection) task. Since the P3 is usually aligned to reaction time/RT, the same should hold for the P600; a failure to find RT alignment of the P600 would pose a problem for the P600-as-P3 hypothesis. In contrast, RT alignment of the P600 would associate it with the well-established VAN/Locus Coeruleus - Noradrenaline - Network subserving cortical reorientation. We failed to falsify the hypothesis of RT alignment. Secondary measures, while less unambiguous, were more in agreement with the P600-as-P3 hypothesis. We interpret our results as corroborating the hypothesis that the P600 is a P3, in that it shows that the P600 is RT-aligned. This perspective is unpredicted by an account of the P600 as indexing high-level processing.
在语言处理过程中，当读者或听众遇到结构异常的短语时，这通常会引发一个晚期正向事件相关电位偏转（P600）。P600通常被理解为结构分析的一个相关指标。这一假设为许多语言神经认知模型提供了依据。然而，P600与P3非常相似，P3可能是由去甲肾上腺素能输入到腹侧注意网络/VAN所支持的重新定向行为的更一般的电生理相关指标。一些研究人员提出，P600是P3的一个实例，而不是反映结构化输入分析的一个独特成分。在这里，我们通过估计在视觉句子处理任务中引发的P600与同时收集的行为测量指标的对齐情况，来检验P600即P3的假设。对在一个单独的非语言（面部检测）任务中引发的P3也进行了类似的分析。由于P3通常与反应时间/RT对齐，P600也应该如此；未能发现P600与RT的对齐将给P600即P3的假设带来问题。相比之下，P600与RT的对齐将使其与已确立的服务于皮层重新定向的VAN/蓝斑 - 去甲肾上腺素 - 网络相关联。我们未能证伪RT对齐的假设。次要测量指标虽然不太明确，但更符合P600即P3的假设。我们将我们的结果解释为证实了P600是P3的假设，因为它表明P600与RT对齐。将P600视为索引高级处理的观点无法预测这一结果。
