Spatiotemporal Neuroimaging of Situated Sentence Comprehension

情境句子理解的时空神经影像

基本信息

批准号：
8076286
负责人：
David Norman Caplan
金额：
$ 32.77万
依托单位：
MASSACHUSETTS GENERAL HOSPITAL
依托单位国家：
美国
项目类别：
财政年份：
2010
资助国家：
美国
起止时间：
2010-06-01 至 2013-05-31
项目状态：
已结题

项目摘要

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The goal of the proposed research is to characterize the location and functional interaction over time of areas of the brain involved in aspects of sentence comprehension. The research is undertaken within a framework that sees comprehension as having multiple information "sources," and as being "interactive" and "situated." This view of sentence comprehension maintains that the propositional meaning of a sentence is, in the final analysis, determined by its syntactic structure and lexical content, and, when comprehension is successful, this meaning is arrived at by a process that assigns syntactic structure (parsing) and combines it with lexical meanings to determine propositional meaning (syntactically-based interpretation, which we will refer to simply as "interpretation"). However, these integrated, central processes are not the only sources of propositional representations that are considered as candidates for the meaning of a sentence. Propositional meanings are also assigned by asyntactic processes such as heuristics that assign agent to a preverbal noun (comprehension has "multiple sources"). These multiple sources yield candidates for the meaning of a sentence on-line, which are eventually eliminated in favor of the syntactically licensed interpretation(s) of a sentence. In addition, parsing and interpretation are affected in an on-line fashion by a variety of types of information such as the frequency of lexical forms and their co-occurrence (comprehension is "interactive"), and by non- linguistic factors such as task conditions (comprehension is "situated"). The proposed research will identify areas of the brain that are involved in aspects of parsing and interpretive operations and their on-line interaction with non-linguistic processes. We will study the two major types of these interactions - those between parsing and interpretation and perceptual and motor processes and those between parsing and interpretation and semantic memory. We will use MR-constrained integrated magnetoencephalography (MEG) and electroelcephalography (EEG) to obtain measures of neural activity that have both fine-grained temporal and spatial resolution, and apply Granger causation analyses (Granger, 1969) to these data to identify patterns of directional causal influence between functionally interpretable ROIs during sentence processing. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: The project will advance our understanding of the complex neural activities that occur during sentence comprehension. As such, the findings will provide a basis for better diagnosis of such disorders.

描述（由申请人提供）：拟议研究的目标是描述参与句子理解方面的大脑区域随时间的位置和功能相互作用。这项研究是在一个框架内进行的，该框架将理解视为具有多个信息“来源”、“交互式”和“情境化”。这种句子理解观认为，句子的命题意义归根结底是由其句法结构和词汇内容决定的，当理解成功时，这个意义是通过分配句法结构（解析）的过程得出的。）并将其与词汇意义相结合来确定命题意义（基于句法的解释，我们简称为“解释”）。然而，这些集成的中心过程并不是被视为句子含义候选的命题表示的唯一来源。命题意义也可以通过非句法过程来分配，例如将主体分配给前动词名词的启发法（理解有“多个来源”）。这些多个来源产生了在线句子含义的候选者，这些候选者最终被淘汰，有利于句子的句法许可的解释。此外，解析和解释以在线方式受到各种类型信息的影响，例如词汇形式的频率及其共现（理解是“交互式的”），以及非语言因素，例如任务条件（理解是“情境”）。拟议的研究将确定大脑中参与解析和解释操作及其与非语言过程在线交互的区域。我们将研究这些相互作用的两种主要类型——解析和解释与知觉和运动过程之间的相互作用，以及解析和解释与语义记忆之间的相互作用。我们将使用 MR 约束的集成脑磁图 (MEG) 和脑电图 (EEG) 来获取具有细粒度时间和空间分辨率的神经活动测量值，并对这些数据应用格兰杰因果分析（Granger，1969）以识别神经活动的模式句子处理过程中功能可解释的 ROI 之间的方向因果影响。公共健康相关性：该项目将增进我们对句子理解过程中发生的复杂神经活动的理解。因此，这些发现将为更好地诊断此类疾病提供基础。