Functional neuroimaging of grammatical class: Ambiguous and unambiguous nouns and verbs

Abstract

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.