Canal Paolo, Pesciarelli Francesca, Vespignani Francesco, Molinaro Nicola, Cacciari Cristina
Laboratorio di Linguistica Giovanni Nencioni, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa.
Department of Biomedical, Metabolical and Neural Sciences, Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia.
J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2017 Jun;43(6):928-943. doi: 10.1037/xlm0000351. Epub 2017 Jan 9.
We investigated the extent to which the literal meanings of the words forming literally plausible idioms (e.g., break the ice) are semantically composed and how the idiomatic meaning is integrated in the unfolding sentence representation. Participants read ambiguous idiom strings embedded in highly predictable, literal, and idiomatic contexts while their EEG was recorded. Control sentences only contained the idiom-final word whose cloze values were as high as in literal and idiomatic contexts. Event-related potentials data showed that differences in the amplitude of a frontal positivity (PNP) emerged at the beginning and at the end of the idiom strings, with the idiomatic context condition associated with more positive voltages. The time frequency analysis of the EEG showed an increase in power of the middle gamma frequency band only in the literal context condition. These findings suggest that sentence revision mechanisms, associated with the frontal PNP, are involved in idiom meaning integration, and that the literal semantic composition of the idiomatic constituents, associated with changes in gamma frequency, is not carried out after idiom recognition. (PsycINFO Database Record
我们研究了构成字面看似合理的习语（如“打破僵局”）的单词字面意义在语义上的组合程度，以及习语意义是如何融入正在展开的句子表征中的。参与者在阅读嵌入高度可预测的字面和习语语境中的歧义习语串时，记录他们的脑电图。对照句子只包含习语最后一个单词，其完形填空值与字面和习语语境中的一样高。事件相关电位数据表明，在习语串的开头和结尾出现了额部正波（PNP）幅度的差异，习语语境条件下的电压更正向。脑电图的时频分析表明，仅在字面语境条件下，中伽马频段的功率增加。这些发现表明，与额部PNP相关的句子修正机制参与了习语意义整合，并且与伽马频率变化相关的习语成分的字面语义组合在习语识别后并未进行。（PsycINFO数据库记录）
