Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China.
Sino-Danish College, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100040, China.
Cereb Cortex. 2023 Jul 24;33(15):9367-9375. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhad209.
Do comprehenders predict the meaning and even the phonological form of upcoming words during language comprehension? With a growing body of evidence suggesting that semantic representations may be predicted, the evidence for phonological prediction is less clear and largely derived from studies conducted in languages utilizing an alphabetic script. In this research, we aim to examine the prediction of phonological information in the processing of Chinese idioms through the use of ERP representational similarity analysis (RSA). The study utilizes four-character Chinese idioms, and phonological overlap was manipulated by varying the syllable at the idiom-final part between idiom pairs so that pairs of idioms share a syllable (i.e. within-pairs) or not (between-pairs). We quantified the similarity between patterns of neural activity of idioms for within- and between-pairs. RSA results revealed greater similarity in neural activity patterns for idioms within-pairs, compared with between-pairs, and critically this similarity effect was observed prior to the presentation of the phonological similarity, providing evidence for the pre-activation of upcoming phonological information, under circumstances that encourage predictive processing.
理解者在语言理解过程中是否能预测即将到来的单词的意思甚至是语音形式？越来越多的证据表明语义表征可能是可以预测的，而语音预测的证据则不太明确，并且主要来自于在使用字母文字的语言中进行的研究。在这项研究中，我们旨在通过使用 ERP 表示相似性分析（RSA）来检验中文成语处理过程中语音信息的预测。该研究使用了四字中文成语，并通过在成语末尾部分改变成语之间的音节来操纵语音重叠，使得成语对共享音节（即对内）或不共享音节（对外）。我们量化了成语对之间的神经活动模式之间的相似性。RSA 结果表明，与对外相比，对内的成语神经活动模式更为相似，并且重要的是，这种相似性效应在呈现语音相似性之前就出现了，这为在鼓励预测处理的情况下即将到来的语音信息的预先激活提供了证据。
