Journal
COGNITIVE NEUROPSYCHOLOGY
Volume 26, Issue 2, Pages 148-171Publisher
ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD
DOI: 10.1080/02643290802536090
Keywords
Neuroimaging; Neuropsychology; Grammatical class
Categories
Funding
- National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders [NIH DC R01-00262]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Neuropsychological and neuroimaging studies of grammatical-class differences suggest that nouns and verbs may be associated with different brain regions. The current functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study focused on auditory grammaticality judgements of two-word stimuli consisting of noun/verb ambiguous and unambiguous nouns and verbs preceded by either the or to. The fMRI results showed effects of class ambiguity in the left inferior frontal gyrus, possibly due to greater selection demands, and effects of grammaticality (yes vs. no response) in left superior temporal gyrus, consistent with greater activation for trials with greater conflict. In addition, posterior left temporal lobe regions showed increased activity on unambiguous trials for verbs than for nouns, consistent with prior imaging studies. Thus, in a task specifically focused on the grammatical (rather than semantic) aspects of words and that used morphologically simple nouns and verbs controlled for imageability, verbs preferentially activated posterior temporal but not frontal lobe regions. However, for ambiguous trials in this same region, nouns showed greater activation than verbs, suggesting that these effects can be modulated by class ambiguity.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available