The Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel.
The Gonda Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center, Bar-Ilan University, Building 901, Room 411, 5290002, Ramat Gan, Israel.
Exp Brain Res. 2021 May;239(5):1427-1438. doi: 10.1007/s00221-021-06067-y. Epub 2021 Mar 7.
The processing of sentences with negative quantifiers (e.g., few) is more costly than of sentences that contain their positive counterparts (e.g., many). While this polarity effect is robust and reliably replicable, its neurological bases are not well understood. In this study, we use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) paradigm for 30 participants to assess the polarity effect in sentences with polar quantifiers, and compare it with the polarity effect of polar adjectives. Both in quantifiers and in adjectives, the polarity effect manifests in the anterior insula bilaterally. The polarity effect in quantifiers, however, shows greater activation in the left hemisphere than it does for adjectives. In particular, left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and left superior temporal sulcus (STS) show increased activation for polarity in quantifiers than in adjectives, which is the evidence for the specific involvement of the language network in this type of polarity processing. Using the polarity effect in adjectives as a control, we provide further evidence for the linguistic complexity that negative quantifiers implicate on processing.
带有否定量词（如 few）的句子的处理比包含其肯定对应词（如 many）的句子更昂贵。虽然这种极性效应是稳健且可靠的，但它的神经基础尚不清楚。在这项研究中，我们使用功能磁共振成像 (fMRI) 范式对 30 名参与者进行评估，以评估带有极性量词的句子中的极性效应，并将其与极性形容词的极性效应进行比较。在量词和形容词中，极性效应都表现为双侧前岛叶。然而，与形容词相比，量词的极性效应在左半球的激活程度更大。特别是，左侧额下回（IFG）和左侧颞上沟（STS）在量词的极性处理中显示出比形容词更高的激活，这为语言网络在这种极性处理中的特定参与提供了证据。使用形容词中的极性效应作为对照，我们进一步证明了否定量词在处理过程中所涉及的语言复杂性。
