The limited role of hippocampal declarative memory in transient semantic activation during online language processing

NEUROPSYCHOLOGIA

卷:152

Article

Brown-Schmidt, Sarah¹  Cho, Sun-Joo¹  Nozari, Nazbanou²  Klooster, Nathaniel³  Duff, Melissa⁴ 

[1] Vanderbilt Univ, Dept Psychol & Human Dev, 221 Kirkland Hall, Nashville, TN 37235 USA

[2] Carnegie Mellon Univ, Dept Psychol, Pittsburgh, PA 15213 USA

[3] Univ Penn, Dept Neurol, Philadelphia, PA 19104 USA

[4] Vanderbilt Univ, Med Ctr, Dept Hearing & Speech Sci, Nashville, TN USA

关键词: Hippocampus;    Amnesia;    Word recognition;    Eye-tracking;    Semantic;    Prediction;   

DOI  :  10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2020.107730

来源: Elsevier

【 摘 要 】

Recent findings point to a role for hippocampus in the moment-by-moment processing of language, including the use and generation of semantic features in certain contexts. What role the hippocampus might play in the processing of semantic relations in spoken language comprehension, however, is unknown. Here we test patients with bilateral hippocampal damage and dense amnesia in order to examine the necessity of hippocampus for lexico-semantic mapping processes in spoken language understanding. In two visual-world eye-tracking experiments, we monitor eye movements to images that are semantically related to spoken words and sentences. We find no impairment in amnesia, relative to matched healthy comparison participants. These findings suggest, at least for close semantic links and simple language comprehension tasks, a lack of necessity for hippocampus in lexico-semantic mapping between spoken words and simple pictures.

【 授权许可】

Free