Ostarek Markus, Huettig Falk
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.
J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2017 Aug;43(8):1215-1224. doi: 10.1037/xlm0000375. Epub 2017 Jan 23.
It is well established that the comprehension of spoken words referring to object concepts relies on high-level visual areas in the ventral stream that build increasingly abstract representations. It is much less clear whether basic low-level visual representations are also involved. Here we asked in what task situations low-level visual representations contribute functionally to concrete word comprehension using an interference paradigm. We interfered with basic visual processing while participants performed a concreteness task (Experiment 1), a lexical-decision task (Experiment 2), and a word class judgment task (Experiment 3). We found that visual noise interfered more with concrete versus abstract word processing, but only when the task required visual information to be accessed. This suggests that basic visual processes can be causally involved in language comprehension, but that their recruitment is not automatic and rather depends on the type of information that is required in a given task situation. (PsycINFO Database Record
众所周知，对指代物体概念的口语单词的理解依赖于腹侧流中的高级视觉区域，这些区域构建了越来越抽象的表征。基本的低级视觉表征是否也参与其中则不太清楚。在这里，我们使用干扰范式，研究在哪些任务情境中低级视觉表征在功能上有助于具体单词的理解。在参与者执行具体性任务（实验1）、词汇判断任务（实验2）和词类判断任务（实验3）时，我们干扰了基本视觉处理。我们发现视觉噪声对具体单词与抽象单词处理的干扰更大，但仅当任务需要访问视觉信息时才会如此。这表明基本视觉过程可能因果性地参与语言理解，但其招募并非自动进行，而是取决于给定任务情境中所需信息的类型。（PsycINFO数据库记录）
