Department of Neuropsychology, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences Leipzig, Germany; Language & Aphasia Laboratory, Department of Neurology, University of Leipzig, Germany.
Department of Neurology, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences Leipzig, Germany.
Neuroimage. 2017 Feb 15;147:812-824. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2016.08.026. Epub 2016 Aug 16.
Previous neuroimaging studies demonstrated that a network of left-hemispheric frontal and temporal brain regions contributes to the integration of contextual information into a sentence. However, it remains unclear how these cortical areas influence and drive each other during contextual integration. The present study used dynamic causal modeling (DCM) to investigate task-related changes in the effective connectivity within this network. We found increased neural activity in left anterior inferior frontal gyrus (aIFG), posterior superior temporal sulcus/middle temporal gyrus (pSTS/MTG) and anterior superior temporal sulcus/MTG (aSTS/MTG) that probably reflected increased integration demands and restructuring attempts during the processing of unexpected or semantically anomalous relative to expected endings. DCM analyses of this network revealed that unexpected endings increased the inhibitory influence of left aSTS/MTG on pSTS/MTG during contextual integration. In contrast, during the processing of semantically anomalous endings, left aIFG increased its inhibitory drive on pSTS/MTG. Probabilistic fiber tracking showed that effective connectivity between these areas is mediated by distinct ventral and dorsal white matter association tracts. Together, these results suggest that increasing integration demands require an inhibition of the left pSTS/MTG, which presumably reflects the inhibition of the dominant expected sentence ending. These results are important for a better understanding of the neural implementation of sentence comprehension on a large-scale network level and might influence future studies of language in post-stroke aphasia after focal lesions.
先前的神经影像学研究表明,左半球额颞叶脑区网络有助于将语境信息整合到句子中。然而,这些皮质区域在语境整合过程中如何相互影响和驱动仍不清楚。本研究使用动态因果建模(DCM)来研究该网络中与任务相关的有效连接的变化。我们发现左额下回(aIFG)、后颞上回/中颞回(pSTS/MTG)和前颞上回/MTG(aSTS/MTG)的神经活动增加,这可能反映了在处理出乎意料或语义异常的句子结尾时,整合需求增加和结构重建的尝试。对该网络的 DCM 分析表明,出乎意料的结尾增加了左 aSTS/MTG 对 pSTS/MTG 在语境整合过程中的抑制影响。相比之下,在处理语义异常的结尾时,左 aIFG 增加了对 pSTS/MTG 的抑制驱动。概率纤维追踪显示,这些区域之间的有效连接由不同的腹侧和背侧白质联合束介导。总之,这些结果表明,增加的整合需求需要抑制左 pSTS/MTG,这可能反映了对主导预期句子结尾的抑制。这些结果对于更好地理解句子理解在大规模网络水平上的神经实现具有重要意义,并可能影响焦点病变后中风失语症患者语言的未来研究。