Giglio Laura, Sharoh Daniel, Ostarek Markus, Hagoort Peter
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Neurobiol Lang (Camb). 2024 Oct 8;5(4):922-941. doi: 10.1162/nol_a_00154. eCollection 2024.
The neural infrastructure for sentence production and comprehension has been found to be mostly shared. The same regions are engaged during speaking and listening, with some differences in how strongly they activate depending on modality. In this study, we investigated how modality affects the connectivity between regions previously found to be involved in syntactic processing across modalities. We determined how constituent size and modality affected the connectivity of the pars triangularis of the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) and of the left posterior temporal lobe (LPTL) with the pars opercularis of the LIFG, the left anterior temporal lobe (LATL), and the rest of the brain. We found that constituent size reliably increased the connectivity across these frontal and temporal ROIs. Connectivity between the two LIFG regions and the LPTL was enhanced as a function of constituent size in both modalities, and it was upregulated in production possibly because of linearization and motor planning in the frontal cortex. The connectivity of both ROIs with the LATL was lower and only enhanced for larger constituent sizes, suggesting a contributing role of the LATL in sentence processing in both modalities. These results thus show that the connectivity among fronto-temporal regions is upregulated for syntactic structure building in both sentence production and comprehension, providing further evidence for accounts of shared neural resources for sentence-level processing across modalities.
人们发现，句子生成和理解的神经基础结构大多是共享的。在说话和倾听过程中，相同的脑区会被激活，只是根据模态不同，它们的激活强度会有所差异。在本研究中，我们调查了模态如何影响先前发现的跨模态参与句法处理的脑区之间的连通性。我们确定了成分大小和模态如何影响左下额叶回（LIFG）三角部、左后颞叶（LPTL）与LIFG岛盖部、左前颞叶（LATL）以及大脑其他部分之间的连通性。我们发现，成分大小可靠地增加了这些额叶和颞叶感兴趣区域（ROI）之间的连通性。在两种模态下，两个LIFG区域与LPTL之间的连通性都随着成分大小的增加而增强，并且在句子生成过程中上调，这可能是由于额叶皮质中的线性化和运动规划。两个ROI与LATL之间的连通性较低，并且仅在成分较大时增强，这表明LATL在两种模态的句子处理中都发挥了作用。因此，这些结果表明，在句子生成和理解过程中，额颞区域之间的连通性为句法结构构建而上调，为跨模态句子层面处理共享神经资源提供了进一步的证据。
