Department of Linguistics, New York University, New York, NY, USA.
New York University Shanghai, 1555 Century Avenue, Shanghai, 200122, China.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2018 Dec;25(6):2309-2322. doi: 10.3758/s13423-018-1469-y.
Featural information (e.g., color or shape) allows interlocutors to focus their attention on the specific items under discussion from the vast set of possibilities in the environment. Intriguingly, when they are used to modify and restrict nouns, adjectives can either carry featural information themselves (e.g., green car) or retrieve featural information from the context (e.g., somebody points at a car and claims that she has the same car or a different car). Do the processing of same/different car and green car share neural correlates? For the composition of nouns with feature-carrying adjectives, prior work revealed early compositional effects (roughly 200 ms after noun onset) in the left anterior temporal lobe. However, although we know that such effects do not extend to cases of numeral quantification, which add no conceptual features to the noun (e.g., two boats), we do not know whether they extend to functional adjectives that themselves introduce no features, but instead reference features in the context. To address this question, we measured magnetoencephalography (MEG) during the processing of five types of noun phrases (NPs): same NPs (e.g., same star), different NPs (e.g., different star), color NPs (e.g., green star), comparative NPs (e.g., larger star), and another NPs (e.g., another star). Our main finding was that between 185 to 240 ms after noun onset, same and different NPs patterned with the color NPs in their elicited left temporal lobe activity, and same NPs even trended toward higher amplitudes than the color NPs. This shows that the mechanism driving combinatory effects in the left temporal cortex does not require the input words to directly name conceptual features, as long as the words reference featural information in the context, and that overlapping neural correlates underlie the composition of featural information from both linguistic and nonlinguistic sources.
特征信息（例如颜色或形状）可使对话者将注意力集中在环境中大量可能性中的特定讨论项目上。有趣的是，当形容词用于修饰和限制名词时，它们本身可以携带特征信息（例如，绿色汽车），或者从上下文中检索特征信息（例如，某人指着一辆汽车并声称她有相同的汽车或不同的汽车）。相同/不同汽车和绿色汽车的处理是否共享神经相关性？对于带有特征形容词的名词组成，先前的工作在左前颞叶中揭示了早期的组合效应（在名词出现后大约 200 毫秒）。然而，尽管我们知道这种效应不会扩展到数字量化的情况，因为数字量化不会为名词添加概念特征（例如，两艘船），但我们不知道它们是否扩展到功能形容词，这些形容词本身不会引入特征，而是引用上下文中的特征。为了解决这个问题，我们在处理五种类型的名词短语（NP）时测量了脑磁图（MEG）：相同 NP（例如，相同的星星），不同 NP（例如，不同的星星），颜色 NP（例如，绿色星星），比较 NP（例如，更大的星星）和其他 NP（例如，另一个星星）。我们的主要发现是，在名词出现后 185 到 240 毫秒之间，相同和不同的 NP 在其引发的左颞叶活动中与颜色 NP 模式一致，并且相同的 NP 甚至趋向于比颜色 NP 更高的振幅。这表明，驱动左颞叶皮层组合效应的机制不需要输入词直接命名概念特征，只要这些词参考上下文中的特征信息，并且来自语言和非语言来源的特征信息的组合具有重叠的神经相关性。
