Neural correlates for nouns and verbs in phrases during syntactic and semantic processing: An fMRI study

Abstract

Previous studies suggest that during lexical and grammatical processing, nouns and verbs show distinct brain activation patterns; specifically, verbs are more associated with prefrontal activation than nouns. However, brain imaging studies suggest no or little differences between noun and verb processing in Mandarin Chinese: a language without morphology inflections. This study used functional magnetic resonance imaging to compare the neural correlates for nouns and verbs in syntactic and semantic processing, which is a major dispute in word categorization, with combinational linguistics rules. The results showed that under both conditions, verbs involved more brain activation in the left prefrontal lobe and the superior temporal gyrus (STG) than did nouns. We found that verbs in syntactic processing elicited higher activation in the middle and inferior frontal gyri (IFG) than nouns, which is consistent with the findings in Indo-European languages. However, Chinese verbs compared with nouns in semantic processing exhibited higher levels of overall activation than under the syntactic processing. Our results revealed that during syntactic and semantic processing, nouns and verbs showed different activation patterns in left IFG, left STG and left MFG. These findings indicate that verbs as compared to nouns are more complex with regard to semantic processing than syntactic processing.