Vogelzang Margreet, Thiel Christiane M, Rosemann Stephanie, Rieger Jochem W, Ruigendijk Esther
Institute of Dutch Studies, University of Oldenburg, Oldenburg, Germany.
Cluster of Excellence "Hearing4all," University of Oldenburg, Oldenburg, Germany.
Neurobiol Lang (Camb). 2020 Jun 1;1(2):226-248. doi: 10.1162/nol_a_00011. eCollection 2020.
Previous research has shown effects of syntactic complexity on sentence processing. In linguistics, syntactic complexity (caused by different word orders) is traditionally explained by distinct linguistic operations. This study investigates whether different complex word orders indeed result in distinct patterns of neural activity, as would be expected when distinct linguistic operations are applied. Twenty-two older adults performed an auditory sentence processing paradigm in German with and without increased cognitive load. The results show that without increased cognitive load, complex sentences show distinct activation patterns compared with less complex, canonical sentences: complex object-initial sentences show increased activity in the left inferior frontal and temporal regions, whereas complex adjunct-initial sentences show increased activity in occipital and right superior frontal regions. Increased cognitive load seems to affect the processing of different sentence structures differently, increasing neural activity for canonical sentences, but leaving complex sentences relatively unaffected. We discuss these results in the context of the idea that linguistic operations required for processing sentence structures with higher levels of complexity involve distinct brain operations.
先前的研究已经表明句法复杂性对句子加工的影响。在语言学中，句法复杂性（由不同的词序引起）传统上是通过不同的语言操作来解释的。本研究调查不同的复杂词序是否确实会导致不同的神经活动模式，这是在应用不同语言操作时所预期的。22名老年人在有和没有增加认知负荷的情况下，用德语执行了一个听觉句子加工范式。结果表明，在没有增加认知负荷的情况下，与不太复杂的典型句子相比，复杂句子表现出不同的激活模式：复杂的宾语前置句在左下额叶和颞叶区域表现出活动增加，而复杂的状语前置句在枕叶和右上额叶区域表现出活动增加。增加的认知负荷似乎对不同句子结构的加工有不同影响，增加了典型句子的神经活动，但对复杂句子相对没有影响。我们在这样一种观点的背景下讨论这些结果，即处理具有更高复杂性水平的句子结构所需的语言操作涉及不同的大脑操作。
