Centre for Cognitive and Brain Sciences, University of Macau, Macau SAR, China; Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Macau, Macau SAR, China.
Centre for Cognitive and Brain Sciences, University of Macau, Macau SAR, China; Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Macau, Macau SAR, China.
Cortex. 2022 Sep;154:184-196. doi: 10.1016/j.cortex.2022.05.016. Epub 2022 Jun 13.
Although the role of morphology in alphabetic language processing has been extensively studied, it is still unclear how morphology is enabled and constrained in morpho-syllabic languages like Chinese. This study aims to inspect the time courses and patterns of brain activation associated with Chinese morphological constraint encoding. Chinese native speakers were recruited to perform visual lexical decisions on real Chinese compound words, pseudowords, and nonwords, whilst behavioral, electroencephalographic, and functional near infrared spectroscopy data were simultaneously recorded. For the first time, both morphological and semantic effects were examined to reveal the corresponding spatio-temporal brain activation patterns based on multimodal data. Brain activation differences between pseudowords and real words indexed morphological sensitivity, whereas differences between real words or pseudowords and nonwords characterized semantic effects. Electrophysiological data showed that semantic processing occurred earlier (N400, 300-450 msec) than morphological processing (450-570 msec), while brain activation patterns revealed a differentiation between morphological parsing (specified in the left inferior frontal gyrus) and semantic analysis (in a broader fronto-temporal network). These findings offer new evidence that morphological constraints are encoded at a late stage of compound word processing in Chinese and suggest that the left prefrontal cortex plays an essential role in this process.
虽然形态学在字母语言处理中的作用已经得到了广泛的研究，但在像中文这样的形态音节语言中，形态学是如何被启用和限制的，仍然不清楚。本研究旨在检查与中文形态约束编码相关的大脑激活的时间进程和模式。我们招募了中文母语者，让他们对真实的中文复合词、假词和非词进行视觉词汇判断，同时记录行为、脑电图和功能近红外光谱数据。这是首次同时检查形态和语义效应，以基于多模态数据揭示相应的时空大脑激活模式。假词和真词之间的大脑激活差异反映了形态敏感性，而真词或假词和非词之间的差异则反映了语义效应。电生理数据表明，语义处理（N400，300-450 毫秒）早于形态处理（450-570 毫秒），而大脑激活模式则揭示了形态分析（在左额下回特异性）和语义分析（在更广泛的额颞网络中）之间的区别。这些发现为中文复合词处理后期的形态约束编码提供了新的证据，并表明左前额叶在这个过程中起着重要作用。
