D'Angiulli Amedeo, Griffiths Gordon, Marmolejo-Ramos Fernando
Department of Neuroscience, Carleton University, Ottawa, ON Canada ; Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies, Carleton University, Ottawa, ON Canada ; Neuroscience of Imagery Cognition and Emotion Research Lab, Carleton University, Ottawa, ON Canada.
Neuroscience of Imagery Cognition and Emotion Research Lab, Carleton University, Ottawa, ON Canada.
Front Psychol. 2015 Jun 29;6:856. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00856. eCollection 2015.
The neural correlates of visualization underlying word comprehension were examined in preschool children. On each trial, a concrete or abstract word was delivered binaurally (part 1: post-auditory visualization), followed by a four-picture array (a target plus three distractors; part 2: matching visualization). Children were to select the picture matching the word they heard in part 1. Event-related potentials (ERPs) locked to each stimulus presentation and task interval were averaged over sets of trials of increasing word abstractness. ERP time-course during both parts of the task showed that early activity (i.e., <300 ms) was predominant in response to concrete words, while activity in response to abstract words became evident only at intermediate (i.e., 300-699 ms) and late (i.e., 700-1000 ms) ERP intervals. Specifically, ERP topography showed that while early activity during post-auditory visualization was linked to left temporo-parietal areas for concrete words, early activity during matching visualization occurred mostly in occipito-parietal areas for concrete words, but more anteriorly in centro-parietal areas for abstract words. In intermediate ERPs, post-auditory visualization coincided with parieto-occipital and parieto-frontal activity in response to both concrete and abstract words, while in matching visualization a parieto-central activity was common to both types of words. In the late ERPs for both types of words, the post-auditory visualization involved right-hemispheric activity following a "post-anterior" pathway sequence: occipital, parietal, and temporal areas; conversely, matching visualization involved left-hemispheric activity following an "ant-posterior" pathway sequence: frontal, temporal, parietal, and occipital areas. These results suggest that, similarly, for concrete and abstract words, meaning in young children depends on variably complex visualization processes integrating visuo-auditory experiences and supramodal embodying representations.
研究了学龄前儿童单词理解背后的视觉化神经关联。在每次试验中，双耳呈现一个具体或抽象的单词（第一部分：听觉后视觉化），随后是一个四张图片的阵列（一个目标图片加三个干扰图片；第二部分：匹配视觉化）。儿童要选择与他们在第一部分听到的单词相匹配的图片。针对每组单词抽象程度不断增加的试验，对与每个刺激呈现和任务间隔相关的事件相关电位（ERP）进行平均。任务两部分的ERP时间进程表明，对具体单词的反应中早期活动（即<300毫秒）占主导，而对抽象单词的反应活动仅在ERP的中期（即300 - 699毫秒）和晚期（即700 - 1000毫秒）才明显。具体而言，ERP地形图显示，虽然听觉后视觉化期间的早期活动与具体单词的左颞顶叶区域有关，但匹配视觉化期间具体单词的早期活动大多发生在枕顶叶区域，而抽象单词的早期活动则更多出现在中央顶叶区域。在中期ERP中，听觉后视觉化与对具体和抽象单词的反应中的顶枕叶和顶额叶活动一致，而在匹配视觉化中，两种类型单词都有顶中央活动。在两种类型单词的晚期ERP中，听觉后视觉化涉及右半球活动，遵循“后 - 前”路径顺序：枕叶、顶叶和颞叶区域；相反，匹配视觉化涉及左半球活动，遵循“前 - 后”路径顺序：额叶、颞叶、顶叶和枕叶区域。这些结果表明，同样地，对于具体和抽象单词，幼儿的语义取决于整合视觉 - 听觉体验和超模态体现表征的不同复杂程度的视觉化过程。
