Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany.
University of Trento.
J Cogn Neurosci. 2018 Aug;30(8):1066-1074. doi: 10.1162/jocn_a_01236. Epub 2018 Jan 11.
In auditory neuroscience, electrophysiological synchronization to low-level acoustic and high-level linguistic features is well established-but its functional purpose for verbal information transmission is unclear. Based on prior evidence for a dependence of auditory task performance on delta-band oscillatory phase, we hypothesized that the synchronization of electrophysiological responses at delta-band frequency to the speech stimulus serves to implicitly align neural excitability with syntactic information. The experimental paradigm of our auditory EEG study uniformly distributed morphosyntactic violations across syntactic phrases of natural sentences, such that violations would occur at points differing in linguistic information content. In support of our hypothesis, we found behavioral responses to morphosyntactic violations to increase with decreasing syntactic information content-in significant correlation with delta-band phase, which had synchronized to our speech stimuli. Our findings indicate that rhythmic electrophysiological synchronization to the speech stream is a functional mechanism that may align neural excitability with linguistic information content, optimizing language comprehension.
在听觉神经科学中，对低水平声学和高水平语言特征的电生理同步已经得到了很好的证实——但它对言语信息传递的功能目的尚不清楚。基于先前关于听觉任务表现依赖于 delta 波段振荡相位的证据，我们假设电生理反应在 delta 波段频率与言语刺激的同步作用是为了将神经兴奋性与句法信息隐含地对齐。在我们的听觉 EEG 研究中，实验范式在自然句子的句法短语中均匀分布形态句法违规，使得违规会出现在语言信息量不同的地方。支持我们的假设，我们发现形态句法违规的行为反应随着句法信息量的减少而增加——与 delta 波段相位呈显著相关，delta 波段相位与我们的言语刺激同步。我们的发现表明，言语流的节律性电生理同步是一种功能机制，它可以将神经兴奋性与语言信息内容对齐，从而优化语言理解。
