Brown-Schmidt Sarah, Cho Sun-Joo, Nozari Nazbanou, Klooster Nathaniel, Duff Melissa
Vanderbilt University, Department of Psychology and Human Development, United States.
Vanderbilt University, Department of Psychology and Human Development, United States.
Neuropsychologia. 2021 Feb 12;152:107730. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2020.107730. Epub 2020 Dec 18.
Recent findings point to a role for hippocampus in the moment-by-moment processing of language, including the use and generation of semantic features in certain contexts. What role the hippocampus might play in the processing of semantic relations in spoken language comprehension, however, is unknown. Here we test patients with bilateral hippocampal damage and dense amnesia in order to examine the necessity of hippocampus for lexico-semantic mapping processes in spoken language understanding. In two visual-world eye-tracking experiments, we monitor eye movements to images that are semantically related to spoken words and sentences. We find no impairment in amnesia, relative to matched healthy comparison participants. These findings suggest, at least for close semantic links and simple language comprehension tasks, a lack of necessity for hippocampus in lexico-semantic mapping between spoken words and simple pictures.
最近的研究结果表明，海马体在语言的即时处理中发挥作用，包括在特定语境中语义特征的使用和生成。然而，海马体在口语理解中语义关系的处理过程中可能扮演什么角色尚不清楚。在这里，我们对患有双侧海马体损伤和严重失忆症的患者进行测试，以检验海马体在口语理解中词汇-语义映射过程的必要性。在两项视觉世界眼动追踪实验中，我们监测对与口语单词和句子语义相关的图像的眼动情况。与匹配的健康对照参与者相比，我们发现失忆症患者没有损伤。这些发现表明，至少对于紧密的语义联系和简单的语言理解任务而言，海马体在口语单词和简单图片之间的词汇-语义映射中并非必需。
