Finocchiaro Chiara, Capasso Rita, Cattaneo Luigi, Zuanazzi Arianna, Miceli Gabriele
Dipartimento di Psicologia e Scienze Cognitive, Università di Trento, Trento, Italy.
S.C.A. Associati, Roma, Italy.
Neuropsychologia. 2015 Oct;77:223-32. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2015.08.025. Epub 2015 Aug 28.
Verbs denote relations between entities acting a role in an event. Thematic roles are essential to the correct use of verbs and involve both semantic and syntactic aspects. We used repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS) to study the involvement of three different left parietal sites in the understanding of thematic roles. In a sentence-to-picture matching task, twelve participants were asked to judge whether or not a given picture matched with a written sentence. Pictures represented simple reversible actions, and sentences were in the active or passive diathesis. Whereas both active and passive sentences require the correct encoding of thematic roles, passives also imply thematic reanalysis, as the canonical order of thematic roles is systematically reversed. The experiment was divided in three sessions. In each session a different parietal site (anterior, middle, posterior) was stimulated at 5 Hz in an event-related fashion, time-locked to the presentation of visual stimuli. Results showed increased accuracy for passive sentences following posterior parietal stimulation. The effect appeared to be (a) TMS-related, as no effect was observed in a control, no-TMS experiment with eighteen new participants; (b) independent from semantic processes involved in word-picture association, as no TMS-related effects were observed in a picture-word matching task. We interpret the results as showing that the posterior parietal site is specifically involved in the assignment of thematic roles, in particular when the correct interpretation of a sentence requires reanalysis of temporarily encoded thematic roles, as in passive reversible sentences.
动词表示在一个事件中发挥作用的实体之间的关系。题元角色对于动词的正确使用至关重要，并且涉及语义和句法两个方面。我们使用重复经颅磁刺激（rTMS）来研究三个不同的左顶叶部位在题元角色理解中的参与情况。在一个句子与图片匹配任务中，12名参与者被要求判断给定的图片是否与书面句子匹配。图片呈现简单的可逆动作，句子采用主动或被动语态。虽然主动句和被动句都需要正确编码题元角色，但被动句还意味着题元重新分析，因为题元角色的规范顺序被系统地颠倒了。实验分为三个阶段。在每个阶段，以事件相关的方式，在与视觉刺激呈现时间锁定的情况下，以5赫兹的频率刺激一个不同的顶叶部位（前部、中部、后部）。结果显示，刺激后顶叶部位后，被动句的准确性提高。这种效应似乎是（a）与TMS相关的，因为在一项有18名新参与者的对照非TMS实验中未观察到效应；（b）独立于单词与图片关联中涉及的语义过程，因为在图片-单词匹配任务中未观察到与TMS相关的效应。我们将结果解释为表明后顶叶部位特别参与题元角色的分配，特别是当句子的正确解释需要重新分析临时编码的题元角色时，如在被动可逆句中。
