Piai Vitória, Anderson Kristopher L, Lin Jack J, Dewar Callum, Parvizi Josef, Dronkers Nina F, Knight Robert T
Department of Psychology, Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720; Radboud University, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour, Donders Centre for Cognition, 6525HR, Nijmegen, The Netherlands; Radboud University Medical Center, Department of Medical Psychology, 6525EX, Nijmegen, The Netherlands;
Department of Psychology, Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2016 Oct 4;113(40):11366-11371. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1603312113. Epub 2016 Sep 19.
Language is classically thought to be supported by perisylvian cortical regions. Here we provide intracranial evidence linking the hippocampal complex to linguistic processing. We used direct recordings from the hippocampal structures to investigate whether theta oscillations, pivotal in memory function, track the amount of contextual linguistic information provided in sentences. Twelve participants heard sentences that were either constrained ("She locked the door with the") or unconstrained ("She walked in here with the") before presentation of the final word ("key"), shown as a picture that participants had to name. Hippocampal theta power increased for constrained relative to unconstrained contexts during sentence processing, preceding picture presentation. Our study implicates hippocampal theta oscillations in a language task using natural language associations that do not require memorization. These findings reveal that the hippocampal complex contributes to language in an active fashion, relating incoming words to stored semantic knowledge, a necessary process in the generation of sentence meaning.
传统观点认为，语言功能由大脑外侧裂周围的皮质区域支持。在此，我们提供了颅内证据，证明海马复合体与语言处理相关。我们通过对海马结构进行直接记录，来研究在记忆功能中起关键作用的θ振荡是否与句子中提供的上下文语言信息量相关。12名参与者听一些句子，这些句子在呈现最后一个单词（以图片形式展示，参与者必须说出该图片对应的单词）之前，要么是有约束的（“She locked the door with the”），要么是无约束的（“She walked in here with the”）。在句子处理过程中，即在图片呈现之前，与无约束的上下文相比，有约束的上下文会使海马θ波功率增加。我们的研究表明，在使用自然语言联想且无需记忆的语言任务中，海马θ振荡发挥了作用。这些发现揭示，海马复合体以一种主动的方式对语言产生作用，将输入的单词与存储的语义知识相关联，这是生成句子意义的必要过程。
