Laboratoire de Psychologie Cognitive, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Aix-Marseille University, Marseille, France; Institute for Language, Communication, and the Brain, Aix-Marseille University, Aix-en-Provence, France.
Laboratoire de Psychologie Cognitive, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Aix-Marseille University, Marseille, France; Department of Language Science, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA.
Neuropsychologia. 2024 Jun 6;198:108885. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2024.108885. Epub 2024 Apr 9.
When a sequence of written words is briefly presented and participants are asked to identify just one word at a post-cued location, then word identification accuracy is higher when the word is presented in a grammatically correct sequence compared with an ungrammatical sequence. This sentence superiority effect has been reported in several behavioral studies and two EEG investigations. Taken together, the results of these studies support the hypothesis that the sentence superiority effect is primarily driven by rapid access to a sentence-level representation via partial word identification processes that operate in parallel over several words. Here we used MEG to examine the neural structures involved in this early stage of written sentence processing, and to further specify the timing of the different processes involved. Source activities over time showed grammatical vs. ungrammatical differences first in the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG: 321-406 ms), then the left anterior temporal lobe (ATL: 466-531 ms), and finally in both left IFG (549-602 ms) and left posterior superior temporal gyrus (pSTG: 553-622 ms). We interpret the early IFG activity as reflecting the rapid bottom-up activation of sentence-level representations, including syntax, enabled by partly parallel word processing. Subsequent activity in ATL and pSTG is thought to reflect the constraints imposed by such sentence-level representations on on-going word-based semantic activation (ATL), and the subsequent development of a more detailed sentence-level representation (pSTG). These results provide further support for a cascaded interactive-activation account of sentence reading.
当一系列书面单词被短暂呈现，并且参与者被要求在提示后识别一个单词的位置，那么在语法正确的序列中呈现单词时，其识别准确性高于在语法不正确的序列中呈现单词。这种句子优势效应在几项行为研究和两项 EEG 研究中都有报道。这些研究的结果表明，句子优势效应主要是通过快速获取句子级别的表示来驱动的，这种表示是通过并行处理多个单词的部分单词识别过程来实现的。在这里，我们使用 MEG 来检查涉及书面句子处理早期阶段的神经结构，并进一步确定涉及的不同过程的时间。源活动随时间显示出语法与非语法差异，首先出现在左侧额下回（IFG：321-406ms），然后出现在左侧颞叶前部（ATL：466-531ms），最后出现在左侧 IFG（549-602ms）和左侧后颞上回（pSTG：553-622ms）。我们将早期 IFG 活动解释为反映了快速的自下而上的句子级表示的激活，包括语法，这是由部分并行的单词处理实现的。随后在 ATL 和 pSTG 中的活动被认为反映了句子级表示对正在进行的基于单词的语义激活（ATL）的约束，以及随后更详细的句子级表示的发展（pSTG）。这些结果为句子阅读的级联交互式激活模型提供了进一步的支持。
