Bottini G, Corcoran R, Sterzi R, Paulesu E, Schenone P, Scarpa P, Frackowiak R S, Frith C D
MRC Clinical Sciences Centre, Hammersmith Hospital, London, UK.
Brain. 1994 Dec;117 ( Pt 6):1241-53. doi: 10.1093/brain/117.6.1241.
We investigated cerebral activity in six normal volunteers using PET to explore the hypothesis that the right hemisphere has a specific role in the interpretation of figurative aspects of language such as metaphors. We also mapped the anatomical structures involved in sentence comprehension. During regional cerebral blood flow measurement subjects were asked to perform three different linguistic tasks: (i) metaphorical comprehension; (ii) literal comprehension of sentences; and (iii) a lexical-decision task. We found that comprehension of sentences compared with the lexical-decision task, induced extensive activation in several regions of the left hemisphere, including the prefrontal and basal frontal cortex, the middle and inferior temporal gyri and temporal pole, the parietal cortex and the precuneus. Comprehension of metaphors was associated with similar activations in the left hemisphere, but in addition, a number of sites were activated in the right hemisphere: the prefrontal cortex, the middle temporal gyrus, the precuneus and the posterior cingulate. We conclude that the interpretation of language involves widespread distributed systems bilaterally with the right hemisphere having a special role in the appreciation of metaphors.
我们使用正电子发射断层扫描（PET）对六名正常志愿者的大脑活动进行了研究，以探讨右半球在解释语言的比喻等形象化方面具有特定作用这一假设。我们还绘制了句子理解所涉及的解剖结构。在进行局部脑血流量测量时，要求受试者执行三项不同的语言任务：（i）隐喻理解；（ii）句子的字面理解；以及（iii）词汇判断任务。我们发现，与词汇判断任务相比，句子理解在左半球的几个区域引发了广泛的激活，包括前额叶和基底额叶皮质、颞中回和颞下回以及颞极、顶叶皮质和楔前叶。隐喻理解在左半球有类似的激活，但此外，右半球的一些部位也被激活：前额叶皮质、颞中回、楔前叶和后扣带回。我们得出结论，语言的解释涉及双侧广泛分布的系统，右半球在隐喻理解中具有特殊作用。
