argument structure and morphological factors in noun and verb processing an fmri study参数结构和名词和动词形态因素处理一项功能磁共振成像研究.pdfVIP

Argument Structure and Morphological Factors in Noun and Verb Processing: An fMRI Study 1 2 1 Gabriele Garbin *, Simona Collina , Patrizia Tabossi 1 Department of Psychology, University of Trieste, Trieste, Italy, 2 Department of Psychology, Suor Orsola Benincasa University, Naples, Italy Abstract In a functional MRI (fMRI) study, we have investigated the grammatical categories of object noun, event noun and verb in order to assess the cortical regions of activation supporting their processing. Twelve Italian healthy participants performed a lexical decision task. They had to decide whether a string was an Italian word or not. Words could be objects like medaglia (medal), or events like the noun pianto (cry); or the verb dormire (to sleep). Noun and verb comparison shows differences in regions of activation in the left Inferior Frontal cortex and in the extent of the same areas. We have found specific areas of activation for object noun, and similarities in the pattern of activation for event noun and verb. The activations induced by pseudowords highly resembled the areas activated by the corresponding word category. The implications of the results are discussed in light of the recent debate on the role of grammatical category in the brain. Citation: Garbin G, Collina S, Tabossi P (2012) Argument Structure and Morphological Factors in Noun and Verb Processing: An fMRI Study. PLoS ONE 7(9): e45091. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0045091 Editor: Jean-Claude Baron, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom Received March 19, 2012; Accepted August 17, 2012; Published September 18, 2012 Copyright: 2012 Garbin et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction