Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, Netherlands; Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, Netherlands.
Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, Netherlands; Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, Netherlands.
Neuroimage. 2016 Nov 15;142:43-54. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2016.03.007. Epub 2016 Mar 9.
We used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to explore the spatiotemporal dynamics of neural oscillations associated with sentence processing in 102 participants. We quantified changes in oscillatory power as the sentence unfolded, and in response to individual words in the sentence. For words early in a sentence compared to those late in the same sentence, we observed differences in left temporal and frontal areas, and bilateral frontal and right parietal regions for the theta, alpha, and beta frequency bands. The neural response to words in a sentence differed from the response to words in scrambled sentences in left-lateralized theta, alpha, beta, and gamma. The theta band effects suggest that a sentential context facilitates lexical retrieval, and that this facilitation is stronger for words late in the sentence. Effects in the alpha and beta bands may reflect the unification of semantic and syntactic information, and are suggestive of easier unification late in a sentence. The gamma oscillations are indicative of predicting the upcoming word during sentence processing. In conclusion, changes in oscillatory neuronal activity capture aspects of sentence processing. Our results support earlier claims that language (sentence) processing recruits areas distributed across both hemispheres, and extends beyond the classical language regions.
我们使用脑磁图（MEG）技术在 102 名参与者中探索与句子处理相关的神经振荡的时空动态。我们量化了句子展开过程中以及对句子中单个单词的振荡功率变化。与同一句子中的后期单词相比，我们观察到左颞叶和额区以及双侧额区和右顶区的θ、α和β频带的差异。句子中单词的神经反应与乱序句子中单词的反应不同，左颞叶、α、β和γ的θ带出现差异。θ 带效应表明句子语境有助于词汇检索，并且对句子后期的单词的促进作用更强。α 和β 频带的影响可能反映了语义和句法信息的统一，并且表明在句子后期更容易统一。γ 振荡是在句子处理过程中预测即将到来的单词的指标。总之，振荡神经元活动的变化捕获了句子处理的各个方面。我们的结果支持了语言（句子）处理在两个半球分布的区域，并且超出了经典语言区域的早期观点。
