Poster B33, Tuesday, August 20, 2019, 3:15 – 5:00 pm, Restaurant Hall
Sociality effects along linguistic hierarchies
Nan Lin1,2, Xiaohong Yang1,2, Meimei Zhang1, Guangyao Zhang1,2, Yangwen Xu3,4, Huichao Yang5;1CAS Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, Beijing, 2Department of Psychology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 3Center for Mind/Brain Studies (CIMeC), University of Trento, 4International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA), Trieste, 5National Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning and IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Beijing Normal University
Introduction A growing number of studies have found that linguistic stimuli conveying social semantics evoke activation in a specific brain network. Although this network has been associated with the function of representing social concepts underlying word meanings, it may, according to the literature of language processing, have considerable overlap with the brain areas supporting sentence and discourse comprehension. Does the sociality effect in language comprehension arise from the activation of word meanings or from high levels of semantic processes required in sentence and discourse comprehension? We investigated this question by manipulating the sociality (high/low) and linguistic hierarchies (word/sentence/discourse) of stimuli in this fMRI study. Methods Thirty-six healthy undergraduate and graduate students participated in the fMRI experiment. The fMRI experiment employed a silent reading task and a block design, containing three runs of 10 minutes and 26 seconds each. The experiment contained six conditions, namely, the high-sociality discourse condition, the low-sociality discourse condition, high-sociality sentence condition, the low-sociality sentence condition, high-sociality word condition, and the low-sociality word condition. We carefully matched several semantic and linguistic variables between the high- and low-sociality stimuli. The stimuli of the sentence and word conditions were constructed by pseudo-randomized the sentences and words used in the discourse conditions. The data analysis was mainly conducted at the region-of-interest (ROI) level. The ROIs were defined based on the result of an ALE meta-analysis of the activity peaks from nine previous fMRI studies that had reported the sociality effect in language comprehension. The meta-analysis revealed six significant clusters located at the bilateral anterior temporal lobes (ATLs), temporal–parietal junctions (TPJs), posterior cingulate (PC)/precuneus, and the left superior frontal gyrus (SFG), respectively. Results The discourse- and sentence-level sociality effects (high-sociality > low-sociality) were significant in all ROIs while the word-level sociality effect was significant only in the bilateral ATLs and the left SFG. All ROIs except the PC/ precuneus showed a significant sentential effect (sentence/discourse > word). All ROIs showed significant interactions between linguistic hierarchies and sociality, with the sociality effect significantly enhanced along the word-sentence and word-discourse hierarchies. Conclusion Our results indicate that the sociality effect in language comprehension reflects not only the activation of social concepts underlying word meanings but also higher levels of social semantic processes required in sentence and discourse comprehension, such as social semantic composition, social working memory, or theory of mind.
Themes: Meaning: Combinatorial Semantics, Meaning: Discourse and Pragmatics
Method: Functional Imaging