The periphrastic anticipatory effect: An fMRI study of the linguistic-driven anticipatory activity of posterior brain areas in causal representation

Abstract

Causal relationships can be either direct (e.g., when one ball strikes another) or indirect (e.g., when one ball strikes an intermediary object that then strikes a second ball). Whereas it has been hypothesized that direct causal relationships are detected automatically by visual brain regions, semantic representations have been shown to mediate the perception of indirect causal relationships. Experimental psycholinguistic research has shown that lexical sentences such as 'the orange ball moves the purple ball' tend to describe direct causal events exclusively whereas periphrastic sentences such as 'the orange ball causes the purple ball to move' describe either direct or indirect causal events. Thus, the periphrastic structure might confer a semantic advantage in the representation of complex causal relationships. This advantage might be instantiated by top-down influences from frontal brain regions on parietal and posterior visual areas. With functional magnetic resonance imaging, we aimed to identify the neural substrates underlying the hypothetical semantic advantage of the periphrastic causative representation in causal perception while participants read periphrastic and lexical instructions. Greater activity in the frontal cortex, precuneus, and the secondary visual area was observed when the participants read the periphrastic instruction compared to the lexical instruction. These findings are interpreted as reflecting anticipatory activity of visual areas modulated by frontal topdown influences of the semantic representation elicited by the periphrastic causative structure.Key Words: Causal representation, neurolinguistics, periphrastic causatives, lexical causatives. 61Resumen: Las relaciones causales pueden ser directas (e.g., cuando una bola golpea a otra) o indirectas (e.g., cuando una bola golpea a un objeto intermediario que posteriormente golpea a una segunda bola). Mientras se ha hipotetizado que las relaciones causales directas son detectadas automáticamente por regiones cerebrales asociadas a la visión, se ha mostrado que las representaciones semánticas median la percepción de relaciones causales indirectas. La investigación psicolingüística ha mostrado que oraciones léxicas como 'la bola anaranjada mueve a la bola púrpura' tienden a describir exclusivamente relaciones directas, mientras oraciones perifrásticas como 'la bola anaranjada hace mover la bola púrpura' describen tanto las relaciones directas como las indirectas. Por tanto, la estructura perifrástica conferiría una ventaja semántica en la representación de relaciones causales. Esta ventaja podría estar implementada mediante actividad descendente de regiones frontales a las occipitales visuales y parietales del cerebro. Mediante resonancia magnética nuclear funcional perseguimos identificar la actividad neural que subyace a la representación perifrástica causativa en la percepción causal durante la lectura de instrucciones léxicas y perifrásticas. Se observó mayor actividad en regiones frontales, la precuña y la corteza visua...