Abstract
Noun/verb dissociations in the literature defy interpretation due to the confound between lexical category and semantic meaning; nouns and verbs typically describe concrete objects and actions. Abstract words, pertaining to neither, are a critical test case: dissociations along lexical-grammatical lines would support models purporting lexical category as the principle governing brain organisation, whilst semantic models predict dissociation between concrete words but not abstract items. During fMRI scanning, participants read orthogonalised word categories of nouns and verbs, with or without concrete, sensorimotor meaning. Analysis of inferior frontal/insula, precentral and central areas revealed an interaction between lexical class and semantic factors with clear category differences between concrete nouns and verbs but not abstract ones. Though the brain stores the combinatorial and lexical-grammatical properties of words, our data show that topographical differences in brain activation, especially in the motor system and inferior frontal cortex, are driven by semantics and not by lexical class.
Highlights
The neurobiological basis of noun and verb processing has been elucidated by cognitive neuroscience research
This study investigated whether topographical patterns of brain activation to nouns and verbs are driven by lexical (grammatical) class or rather by semantics and word meaning
We found that concrete nouns and verbs activate frontocentral cortex to different degrees
Summary
The neurobiological basis of noun and verb processing has been elucidated by cognitive neuroscience research. Literature as most verbs are undeniably words used to speak about actions whereas most nouns refer to objects, so it is hardly possible to match and control for relevant semantic differences between the lexical classes; were one to succeed in precisely matching sets of nouns and verbs for factors such as the concreteness of their object reference and intensity of their action relationship, one might, from a linguistic perspective, still argue that such selections would certainly be far from representing typical specimens from the lexical groups. Given this seemingly hopeless confound of lexical class with semantics, it is unsurprising that many scholars have tried to trace the ‘‘lexical’’ differences to their semantic origins, at least as far as putative word class specific brain activation patterns are concerned
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