Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY, United States of America.
NYUAD Research Institute, New York University Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi, UAE.
PLoS One. 2023 Oct 17;18(10):e0292316. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0292316. eCollection 2023.
The picture naming task is common both as a clinical task and as a method to study the neural bases of speech production in the healthy brain. However, this task is not reflective of most naturally occurring productions, which tend to happen within a context, typically in dialogue in response to someone else's production. How the brain basis of the classic "confrontation picture naming" task compares to the planning of utterances in dialogue is not known. Here we used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to measure neural activity associated with language production using the classic picture naming task as well as a minimal variant of the task, intended as more interactive or dialogue-like. We assessed how neural activity is affected by the interactive context in children, teenagers, and adults. The general pattern was that in adults, the interactive task elicited a robust sustained increase of activity in frontal and temporal cortices bilaterally, as compared to simple picture naming. This increase was present only in the left hemisphere in teenagers and was absent in children, who, in fact, showed the reverse effect. Thus our findings suggest a robustly bilateral neural basis for the coordination of interaction and a very slow developmental timeline for this network.
图片命名任务既是一种临床任务，也是研究健康大脑中言语产生的神经基础的一种方法。然而，这项任务并不能反映大多数自然发生的言语产生，这些言语通常发生在语境中，通常是在对话中对他人言语的回应。经典的“面对面图片命名”任务的大脑基础与对话中话语的计划有何不同尚不清楚。在这里，我们使用脑磁图（MEG）来测量使用经典图片命名任务以及更具交互性或对话性的任务的最小变体进行语言产生相关的神经活动。我们评估了神经活动如何受到儿童、青少年和成年人互动语境的影响。一般来说，与简单的图片命名相比，在成年人中，互动任务会在双侧额颞叶皮层引起强烈的持续活动增加。在青少年中，这种增加只存在于左半球，而在儿童中则不存在，实际上，儿童表现出相反的效果。因此，我们的发现表明，互动的协调具有强大的双侧神经基础，而这个网络的发展时间表非常缓慢。
