An FMRI Study On The Neurocognitive Processing Of Chinese Dirty-Words

In this thesis,functional magnetic resonance imaging(fMRI)was used to study the brain regions related to the activation of Chinese dirty words' comprehension,and compared with those related to the activation of Chinese neutral and negative words'comprehension,so as to reveal the neurocognitive processing of Chinese dirty words.Dirty words,as a widespread category in languages,have been neglected for a long time because of their own characteristics,"dirty".Some scholars have studied the dirty words from the perspectives of their existence,development,classification and uses,but those studies were still in the stage of static description and analysis.The study on neurocognitive processing of Chinese dirty words is relatively insufficient.On the other hand,dirty words embody strongly negative emotional information,they are often used to express the speaker's emotional attitude.Therefore,this study is based on the emotional aspects of dirty words.A total of 20 college students were selected as participants.120 Chinese words(40 Chinese dirty words,40 Chinese negative words and 40 Chinese neutral words,)and 120 Chinese false words(a meaningless combination of three or four Chinese characters)were selected as experimental stimulus.During the experiment,participants were asked to perform the task of judging whether the observed word was a true or a false word.During the experiment,GE 7503.0 T magnetic resonance scanner was used to collect functional and structural images which covered the whole brain.After the experiment,the experimental data were analyzed.The data of two participants with high error rate,and the data of four participants with head translation more than 2 mm and head rotation more than 2 degrees were deleted.Finally,the remained 14 data were analyzed by SPM12,and the final experimental results were obtained.Behavioral results of the experiment revealed that the accuracy of dirty words,neutral words and negative words is identical,but the response time of dirty words is lower than neutral and negative words.FMRI data showed that the left inferior frontal gyrus,left middle temporal gyrus,right superior frontal gyrus,right inferior frontal gyrus,superior temporal gyrus and right cuneiform lobe were significantly activated after subtracting the neutral words' activation from the dirty words' activation.And the inferior frontal gyrus(bilateral),the right superior frontal gyrus and the left middle frontal gyrus were activated after subtracting the negative words' activation from the dirty words' activation.The results of this experiment showed that dirty words activated more brain regions than neutral and negative words.However,the activation of the dirty words in this experiment is basically identical with the negative words used in the previous studies.