Muñetón-Ayala Mercedes, De Vega Manuel, Ochoa-Gómez John Fredy, Beltrán David
Programa de Filología Hispánica, Facultad de Comunicaciones y Filología, Universidad de Antioquia, Calle 70 N° 52-21, Medellín 050010, Colombia.
Instituto Universitario de Neurociencia, Universidad de la Laguna, 38200 Tenerife, Spain.
Brain Sci. 2022 Mar 29;12(4):458. doi: 10.3390/brainsci12040458.
This study examines the neural dynamics underlying the prosodic (duration) and the semantic dimensions in Spanish sentence perception. Specifically, we investigated whether adult listeners are aware of changes in the duration of a pretonic syllable of words that were either semantically predictable or unpredictable from the preceding sentential context. Participants listened to the sentences with instructions to make prosodic or semantic judgments, while their EEG was recorded. For both accuracy and RTs, the results revealed an interaction between duration and semantics. ERP analysis exposed an interactive effect between task, duration and semantic, showing that both processes share neural resources. There was an enhanced negativity on semantic process (N400) and an extended positivity associated with anomalous duration. Source estimation for the N400 component revealed activations in the frontal gyrus for the semantic contrast and in the parietal postcentral gyrus for duration contrast in the metric task, while activation in the sub-lobar insula was observed for the semantic task. The source of the late positive components was located on posterior cingulate. Hence, the ERP data support the idea that semantic and prosodic levels are processed by similar neural networks, and the two linguistic dimensions influence each other during the decision-making stage in the metric and semantic judgment tasks.
本研究考察了西班牙语句子感知中韵律（时长）和语义维度背后的神经动力学。具体而言，我们调查了成年听众是否能察觉到单词重音前音节时长的变化，这些单词在语义上是可从前文语境预测的还是不可预测的。参与者在听句子时被要求做出韵律或语义判断，同时记录他们的脑电图。在准确率和反应时方面，结果都显示出时长和语义之间存在交互作用。事件相关电位（ERP）分析揭示了任务、时长和语义之间的交互效应，表明这两个过程共享神经资源。在语义加工过程中出现了增强的负波（N400），以及与异常时长相关的延长正波。N400成分的源估计显示，在韵律任务中，语义对比在额回激活，时长对比在顶叶中央后回激活，而在语义任务中，激活出现在脑岛叶下区域。晚期正波成分的源位于后扣带回。因此，ERP数据支持了语义和韵律层面由相似神经网络处理的观点，并且在韵律和语义判断任务的决策阶段，这两个语言维度相互影响。
