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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access originally published online on May 16, 2007
Cerebral Cortex 2008 18(1):171-177; doi:10.1093/cercor/bhm043
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© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

The Neural Substrate of Naming Events: Effects of Processing Demands but not of Grammatical Class

Simona Siri1, Marco Tettamanti1, Stefano F. Cappa1, Pasquale Della Rosa1, Cristina Saccuman1, Paola Scifo1 and Gabriella Vigliocco2

1 Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Vita-Salute San Raffaele University and San Raffaele Scientific Institute, Milano, Italy, 2 Department of Psychology, University College of London, London, UK

Address correspondence to Gabriella Vigliocco, Department of Psychology, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1, UK. Email: g.vigliocco{at}ucl.ac.uk.

Grammatical class is a fundamental property of language, and all natural languages distinguish between nouns and verbs. Brain activation studies have provided conflicting evidence concerning the neural substrates of noun and verb processing. A major limitation of many previous imaging studies is that they did not disentangle the impact of grammatical class from the differences in semantic correlates. In order to tease apart the role of semantic and grammatical factors, we performed a functional magnetic resonance imaging study presenting Italian speakers with pictures of events and asked them to name them as 1) Infinitive Verb (e.g., mangiare [to eat]); 2) Inflected Verb (e.g., mangia [she/he eats]); and 3) Action Noun (e.g., mangiata [the eating]). We did not find any verb-specific activation. However, reliable left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) activations were found when contrasting the Action Noun with the Infinitive Verb condition. A second-level analysis indicated then that activation in left IFG was greatest for Action Nouns, intermediate for Inflected Verbs, and least for Infinitive Verbs. We conclude that, when all other factors are controlled, nouns and verbs are processed by a common neural system. In the present case, differences in left IFG activation emerge as a consequence of increasing linguistic and/or general processing demands.

Key Words: Broca area • fMRI • grammatical class • left IFG • overt picture naming


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