Coopmans Cas W, de Hoop Helen, Hagoort Peter, Martin Andrea E
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Centre for Language Studies, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Neurobiol Lang (Camb). 2022 Jun 21;3(3):386-412. doi: 10.1162/nol_a_00070. eCollection 2022.
Recent research has established that cortical activity "tracks" the presentation rate of syntactic phrases in continuous speech, even though phrases are abstract units that do not have direct correlates in the acoustic signal. We investigated whether cortical tracking of phrase structures is modulated by the extent to which these structures compositionally determine meaning. To this end, we recorded electroencephalography (EEG) of 38 native speakers who listened to naturally spoken Dutch stimuli in different conditions, which parametrically modulated the degree to which syntactic structure and lexical semantics determine sentence meaning. Tracking was quantified through mutual information between the EEG data and either the speech envelopes or abstract annotations of syntax, all of which were filtered in the frequency band corresponding to the presentation rate of phrases (1.1-2.1 Hz). Overall, these mutual information analyses showed stronger tracking of phrases in regular sentences than in stimuli whose lexical-syntactic content is reduced, but no consistent differences in tracking between sentences and stimuli that contain a combination of syntactic structure and lexical content. While there were no effects of compositional meaning on the degree of phrase-structure tracking, analyses of event-related potentials elicited by sentence-final words did reveal meaning-induced differences between conditions. Our findings suggest that cortical tracking of structure in sentences indexes the internal generation of this structure, a process that is modulated by the properties of its input, but not by the compositional interpretation of its output.
最近的研究表明，即使短语是抽象单元，在声学信号中没有直接对应物，皮层活动也会“跟踪”连续语音中句法短语的呈现速率。我们研究了短语结构的皮层跟踪是否会受到这些结构在语义组合上决定意义的程度的调节。为此，我们记录了38名以荷兰语为母语的人的脑电图（EEG），他们在不同条件下听自然说出的荷兰语刺激，这些条件参数化地调节了句法结构和词汇语义决定句子意义的程度。通过脑电图数据与语音包络或句法抽象注释之间的互信息对跟踪进行量化，所有这些都在与短语呈现速率相对应的频段（1.1 - 2.1赫兹）中进行滤波。总体而言，这些互信息分析表明，与词汇 - 句法内容减少的刺激相比，规则句子中的短语跟踪更强，但在包含句法结构和词汇内容组合的句子和刺激之间，跟踪没有一致的差异。虽然语义组合对短语结构跟踪程度没有影响，但对句末单词引发的事件相关电位的分析确实揭示了不同条件之间由意义引起的差异。我们的研究结果表明，句子中结构的皮层跟踪反映了这种结构的内部生成，这一过程受其输入属性的调节，但不受其输出的语义组合解释的调节。
