Abstract
This study examined whether the degree of complexity of a grammatical component in a language would impact on its representation in the brain through identifying the neural correlates of grammatical morpheme processing associated with nouns and verbs in Chinese. In particular, the processing of Chinese nominal classifiers and verbal aspect markers were investigated in a sentence completion task and a grammaticality judgment task to look for converging evidence. The Chinese language constitutes a special case because it has no inflectional morphology per se and a larger classifier than aspect marker inventory, contrary to the pattern of greater verbal than nominal paradigmatic complexity in most European languages. The functional imaging results showed BA47 and left supplementary motor area and superior medial frontal gyrus more strongly activated for classifier processing, and the left posterior middle temporal gyrus more responsive to aspect marker processing. We attributed the activation in the left prefrontal cortex to greater processing complexity during classifier selection, analogous to the accounts put forth for European languages, and the left posterior middle temporal gyrus to more demanding verb semantic processing. The overall findings significantly contribute to cross-linguistic observations of neural substrates underlying processing of grammatical morphemes from an analytic and a classifier language, and thereby deepen our understanding of neurobiology of human language.
Highlights
Languages vary widely in the complexity of their morphosyntactic system
Imaging Results Conjunction analyses of CL vs. aspect markers (ASPs) contrasts between the two concreteness levels in the sentence completion task revealed that the left posterior middle temporal gyrus was activated more strongly for the ASP sentences than the CL sentences for both concrete and abstract levels, whereas regions showing greater activation for the CL conditions of both concreteness levels included bilateral calcarine and lingual gyri, bilateral orbital inferior frontal gyri and insula cortex (BA47, right BA47), as well as the left supplementary motor area and superior medial frontal gyrus (LSMA&SMedFG)
The neural bases underlying processing of Chinese classifiers and aspect markers were investigated through one expressive task – sentence completion, and one receptive task—grammaticality judgment, to look for converging evidence for the processing of Chinese grammatical morphemes associated with nouns and verbs
Summary
Languages vary widely in the complexity of their morphosyntactic system. For instance, on one end of the spectrum, the Chinese language is well-known for its impoverished inflectional morphology [1,2]. Contrary to most European languages in which the verbal paradigm is more complex than the nominal counterpart, the contrast between the nominal classifier and verbal aspect marker inventories in Chinese presents the opposite pattern This difference renders Chinese a highly interesting testing ground for assessing the view that neural correlates of morphosyntactic processes, in LIFG, specific to a grammatical class is driven by computational demands. Similar to [25,26], conjunction analyses were conducted in the production experiment to identify brain areas that were more activated for classifiers than aspect markers as well as those that were more active for verbal than nominal grammatical morphemes across concreteness conditions The use of both concrete and abstract items and conjunction analyses across concreteness levels is an important aspect of the current design. Task-independent regions activated for a grammatical morpheme type were considered for their associated cognitive processes
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