Ding Nai, Melloni Lucia, Yang Aotian, Wang Yu, Zhang Wen, Poeppel David
College of Biomedical Engineering and Instrument Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China.
State Key Laboratory of Industrial Control Technology, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China.
Front Hum Neurosci. 2017 Sep 28;11:481. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2017.00481. eCollection 2017.
To understand speech, listeners have to combine the words they hear into phrases and sentences. Recent magnetoencephalography (MEG) and electrocorticography (ECoG) studies show that cortical activity is concurrently entrained/synchronized to the rhythms of multiple levels of linguistic units including words, phrases, and sentences. Here we investigate whether this phenomenon can be observed using electroencephalography (EEG), a technique that is more widely available than MEG and ECoG. We show that the EEG responses concurrently track the rhythms of hierarchical linguistic units such as syllables/words, phrases, and sentences. The strength of the sentential-rate response correlates with how well each subject can detect random words embedded in a sequence of sentences. In contrast, only a syllabic-rate response is observed for an unintelligible control stimulus. In sum, EEG provides a useful tool to characterize neural encoding of hierarchical linguistic units, potentially even in individual participants.
为了理解言语，听众必须将他们听到的单词组合成短语和句子。最近的脑磁图（MEG）和皮层脑电图（ECoG）研究表明，皮层活动同时被多种语言单位（包括单词、短语和句子）的节奏所夹带/同步。在这里，我们研究是否可以使用脑电图（EEG）观察到这种现象，EEG是一种比MEG和ECoG更广泛可用的技术。我们表明，EEG反应同时跟踪音节/单词、短语和句子等层次语言单位的节奏。句子速率反应的强度与每个受试者检测嵌入句子序列中的随机单词的能力相关。相比之下，对于不可理解的对照刺激，只观察到音节速率反应。总之，EEG提供了一个有用的工具来表征层次语言单位的神经编码，甚至可能在个体参与者中。
