Matchin William, Almeida Diogo, Hickok Gregory, Sprouse Jon
University of South Carolina.
New York University Abu Dhabi.
J Cogn Neurosci. 2025 Feb 1;37(2):414-442. doi: 10.1162/jocn_a_02266.
In principle, functional neuroimaging provides uniquely informative data in addressing linguistic questions, because it can indicate distinct processes that are not apparent from behavioral data alone. This could involve adjudicating the source of unacceptability via the different patterns of elicited brain responses to different ungrammatical sentence types. However, it is difficult to interpret brain activations to syntactic violations. Such responses could reflect processes that have nothing intrinsically related to linguistic representations, such as domain-general executive function abilities. To facilitate the potential use of functional neuroimaging methods to identify the source of different syntactic violations, we conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment to identify the brain activation maps associated with two distinct syntactic violation types: phrase structure (created by inverting the order of two adjacent words within a sentence) and subject islands (created by extracting a wh-phrase out of an embedded subject). The comparison of these violations to control sentences surprisingly showed no indication of a generalized violation response, with almost completely divergent activation patterns. Phrase structure violations seemingly activated regions previously implicated in verbal working memory and structural complexity in sentence processing, whereas the subject islands appeared to activate regions previously implicated in conceptual-semantic processing, broadly defined. We review our findings in the context of previous research on syntactic and semantic violations using ERPs. Although our results suggest potentially distinct underlying mechanisms underlying phrase structure and subject island violations, our results are tentative and suggest important methodological considerations for future research in this area.
原则上，功能神经成像在解决语言问题时能提供独特的信息丰富的数据，因为它可以指出仅从行为数据中不明显的不同过程。这可能涉及通过对不同不合语法的句子类型引发的大脑反应的不同模式来判定不可接受性的来源。然而，很难解释大脑对句法违规的激活情况。这样的反应可能反映的是与语言表征没有内在联系的过程，比如领域通用的执行功能能力。为了促进功能神经成像方法在识别不同句法违规来源方面的潜在应用，我们进行了一项功能磁共振成像实验，以识别与两种不同句法违规类型相关的大脑激活图：短语结构（通过颠倒句子中两个相邻单词的顺序产生）和主语孤岛（通过从嵌入的主语中提取一个wh短语产生）。将这些违规情况与对照句子进行比较，令人惊讶的是，没有显示出普遍违规反应的迹象，激活模式几乎完全不同。短语结构违规似乎激活了先前与言语工作记忆和句子处理中的结构复杂性有关的区域，而主语孤岛似乎激活了先前与广义概念语义处理有关的区域。我们在先前使用事件相关电位对句法和语义违规进行研究的背景下回顾我们的发现。虽然我们的结果表明短语结构和主语孤岛违规可能有不同的潜在机制，但我们的结果是初步的，并为该领域未来的研究提出了重要的方法学考虑。
