Department of Computing Science & Psychology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
National Human Genome Research Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland.
Hum Brain Mapp. 2019 Oct 15;40(15):4457-4469. doi: 10.1002/hbm.24714. Epub 2019 Jul 16.
As a person reads, the brain performs complex operations to create higher order semantic representations from individual words. While these steps are effortless for competent readers, we are only beginning to understand how the brain performs these actions. Here, we explore lexical semantics using magnetoencephalography (MEG) recordings of people reading adjective-noun phrases presented one word at a time. We track the neural representation of single word representations over time, through different brain regions. Our results reveal two novel findings: (a) a neural representation of the adjective is present during noun presentation, but this representation is different from that observed during adjective presentation and (b) the neural representation of adjective semantics observed during adjective reading is reactivated after phrase reading, with remarkable consistency. We also note that while the semantic representation of the adjective during the reading of the adjective is very distributed, the later representations are concentrated largely to temporal and frontal areas previously associated with composition. Taken together, these results paint a picture of information flow in the brain as phrases are read and understood.
当一个人阅读时，大脑会执行复杂的操作，从单个单词中创建更高阶的语义表示。虽然这些步骤对于熟练的读者来说毫不费力，但我们才刚刚开始了解大脑如何执行这些操作。在这里，我们使用时频电磁描记术（MEG）记录人们阅读一次呈现一个单词的形容词-名词短语，来探索词汇语义。我们通过不同的大脑区域，跟踪单个单词表示随时间的神经表示。我们的结果揭示了两个新的发现：（a）在名词呈现期间存在形容词的神经表示，但该表示与在形容词呈现期间观察到的表示不同，以及（b）在形容词阅读期间观察到的形容词语义的神经表示在短语阅读后被重新激活，具有显著的一致性。我们还注意到，虽然在阅读形容词期间形容词的语义表示非常分散，但后来的表示主要集中在以前与构成相关的颞叶和额叶区域。综上所述，这些结果描绘了在阅读和理解短语时大脑中的信息流。
