Maastricht Brain Imaging Center, Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience, Maastricht University, Maastricht, Netherlands.
Maastricht Brain Imaging Center, Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience, Maastricht University, Maastricht, Netherlands.
Clin Neurophysiol. 2024 Oct;166:56-65. doi: 10.1016/j.clinph.2024.07.012. Epub 2024 Jul 26.
The mental parsing of linguistic hierarchy is crucial for language comprehension, and while there is growing interest in the cortical tracking of auditory speech, the neurophysiological substrates for tracking written language are still unclear.
We recorded electroencephalographic (EEG) responses from participants exposed to auditory and visual streams of either random syllables or tri-syllabic real words. Using a frequency-tagging approach, we analyzed the neural representations of physically presented (i.e., syllables) and mentally constructed (i.e., words) linguistic units and compared them between the two sensory modalities.
We found that tracking syllables is partially modality dependent, with anterior and posterior scalp regions more involved in the tracking of spoken and written syllables, respectively. The cortical tracking of spoken and written words instead was found to involve a shared anterior region to a similar degree, suggesting a modality-independent process for word tracking.
Our study suggests that basic linguistic features are represented in a sensory modality-specific manner, while more abstract ones are modality-unspecific during the online processing of continuous language input.
The current methodology may be utilized in future research to examine the development of reading skills, especially the deficiencies in fluent reading among those with dyslexia.
语言层次结构的心理分析对于语言理解至关重要，尽管人们对听觉言语的皮层追踪越来越感兴趣，但用于追踪书面语言的神经生理基础仍不清楚。
我们记录了暴露于随机音节或三音节真实单词的听觉和视觉流的参与者的脑电图（EEG）反应。使用频率标记方法，我们分析了物理呈现（即音节）和心理构建（即单词）语言单位的神经表示，并在两种感觉模式之间进行了比较。
我们发现，音节的追踪部分依赖于感觉模式，额区和枕区分别更多地参与到口语和书面音节的追踪中。而口语和书面单词的皮层追踪则被发现涉及到一个相似程度的共享前区，这表明单词追踪是一种与感觉模式无关的过程。
我们的研究表明，基本的语言特征以感觉模式特异性的方式表示，而在连续语言输入的在线处理中，更抽象的语言特征则是非感觉模式特异性的。
当前的方法学可以在未来的研究中用于检查阅读技能的发展，特别是在阅读障碍者中流畅阅读的缺陷。
