Artificial syntactic violations activate Broca’s region

In the present study, using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging, we investigated a group of participants on a grammaticality classification task after they had been exposed to well-formed consonant strings generated from an artificial regular grammar. We used an implicit acquisition paradigm in which the participants were exposed to positive examples. The objective of this study was to investigate whether brain regions related to language processing overlap with the brain regions activated by the grammaticality classification task used in the present study. Recent meta-analyses of functional neuroimaging studies indicate that syntactic processing is related to the left inferior frontal gyrus (Brodmann’s areas 44 and 45) or Broca’s region. In the present study, we observed that artificial grammaticality violations activated Broca’s region in all participants. This observation lends some support to the suggestions that artificial grammar learning represents a model for investigating aspects of language learning in infants [TICS 4 (2000) 178] and adults [Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of United States of America 99 (2002) 529].     

《周易》古经词法探析

《周易》古经是研究上古汉语不可多得的宝贵资料，然而语言学界对它尚缺乏足够的重视，忽略了对它的研究。本文是继《〈周易〉古经句法探析》之后又一篇研究古经语法的文章。它系统地论述了古经文的构词法、各种词类及其语法作用；指出了作为上古汉语著作的古经在词法上的初始性和不完备性，以及词法与句法发展的不平衡性，揭示了上古语法发展的一个特点。