Heyselaar Evelien, Segaert Katrien, Walvoort Serge J W, Kessels Roy P C, Hagoort Peter
Neurobiology of Language Department, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Neurobiology of Language Department, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands; School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, United Kingdom.
Neuropsychologia. 2017 Jul 1;101:97-105. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2017.04.033. Epub 2017 Apr 29.
Syntactic priming, the phenomenon in which participants adopt the linguistic behaviour of their partner, is widely used in psycholinguistics to investigate syntactic operations. Although the phenomenon of syntactic priming is well documented, the memory system that supports the retention of this syntactic information long enough to influence future utterances, is not as widely investigated. We aim to shed light on this issue by assessing patients with Korsakoff's amnesia on an active-passive syntactic priming task and compare their performance to controls matched in age, education, and premorbid intelligence. Patients with Korsakoff's syndrome display deficits in all subdomains of declarative memory, yet their nondeclarative memory remains intact, making them an ideal patient group to determine which memory system supports syntactic priming. In line with the hypothesis that syntactic priming relies on nondeclarative memory, the patient group shows strong priming tendencies (12.6% passive structure repetition). Our healthy control group did not show a priming tendency, presumably due to cognitive interference between declarative and nondeclarative memory. We discuss the results in relation to amnesia, aging, and compensatory mechanisms.
句法启动是指参与者采用其伙伴的语言行为的现象，在心理语言学中被广泛用于研究句法操作。尽管句法启动现象已有充分记录，但支持这种句法信息保留足够长时间以影响未来话语的记忆系统却未得到同样广泛的研究。我们旨在通过让科尔萨科夫失忆症患者完成主动-被动句法启动任务来阐明这一问题，并将他们的表现与在年龄、教育程度和病前智力方面相匹配的对照组进行比较。科尔萨科夫综合征患者在陈述性记忆的所有子领域都存在缺陷，但其非陈述性记忆保持完好，这使他们成为确定哪种记忆系统支持句法启动的理想患者群体。与句法启动依赖非陈述性记忆的假设一致，患者组表现出强烈的启动倾向（被动结构重复率为12.6%）。我们的健康对照组未表现出启动倾向，推测是由于陈述性记忆和非陈述性记忆之间的认知干扰。我们将结合失忆症、衰老和代偿机制来讨论这些结果。
