Raghavan Vinay S, Parra Lucas C
Department of Biomedical Engineering, The City College of New York, New York, NY 10031, USA.
iScience. 2025 May 30;28(7):112798. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2025.112798. eCollection 2025 Jul 18.
Reading is a complex process that involves translating characters into meaning. Orthographic, phonologic, and semantic features of individual words seem to play a role, but it is not clear how the brain encodes these features during natural reading. To answer this, we analyzed eye tracking and electroencephalography (EEG) signals while proficient adult readers read full sentences of English text. We found that fixation-locked neural responses are modulated by the complete linguistic hierarchy. This included modulation with phoneme and phonotactic information, typically observed during auditory processing of speech. Notably, responses were modulated by the phonotactics of prior words and phonemes of the current word. Our results indicate that natural sentence reading involves, in parallel, comprehensive encoding of the fixated word, phonotactic encoding for previous words, and contextual encoding of words around fixation.
阅读是一个复杂的过程，涉及将字符转化为意义。单个单词的正字法、语音学和语义特征似乎都发挥着作用，但目前尚不清楚大脑在自然阅读过程中是如何编码这些特征的。为了回答这个问题，我们在熟练的成年读者阅读完整的英语句子时，分析了眼动追踪和脑电图（EEG）信号。我们发现，注视锁定的神经反应受到完整语言层次结构的调节。这包括由音素和音位结构信息进行的调节，这种调节通常在语音的听觉处理过程中观察到。值得注意的是，反应受到前一个单词的音位结构和当前单词的音素的调节。我们的结果表明，自然句子阅读同时涉及对注视单词的全面编码、对前一个单词的音位结构编码以及对注视点周围单词的语境编码。
