Skip Navigation



Cerebral Cortex Advance Access published online on October 23, 2006
Cerebral Cortex, doi:10.1093/cercor/bhl099
This Article
Right arrow FREE Full Text (PDF) Freely available
Right arrow Supplementary Material
Right arrow Supplementary Material
Right arrow All Versions of this Article:
17/8/1812    most recent
bhl099v1
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Similar articles in PubMed
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Longe, O.
Right arrow Articles by Tyler, L.K.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
PubMed
Right arrow PubMed Citation
Right arrow Articles by Longe, O.
Right arrow Articles by Tyler, L.K.
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?

© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Article

Grammatical Categories in the Brain: The Role of Morphological Structure

O. Longe 1, B. Randall 1, E.A. Stamatakis 1, and L.K. Tyler 1 *

1 Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Cambridge, Downing Site, Cambridge CB2 3EB, UK

* To whom correspondence should be addressed.
L.K. Tyler, E-mail: lktyler{at}csl.psychol.cam.ac.uk


  Abstract

The current study addresses the controversial issue of how different grammatical categories are neurally processed. Several lesion-deficit studies suggest that distinct neural substrates underlie the representation of nouns and verbs, with verb deficits associated with damage to left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) and noun deficits with damage to left temporal cortex. However, this view is not universally shared by neuropsychological and neuroimaging studies. We have suggested that these inconsistencies may reflect interactions between the morphological structure of nouns and verbs and the processing implications of this, rather than differences in their neural representations (Tyler et al. 2004). We tested this hypothesis using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging, to scan subjects performing a valence judgment on unambiguous nouns and verbs, presented as stems (‘snail, hear’) and inflected forms (‘snails, hears’). We predicted that activations for noun and verb stems would not differ, whereas inflected verbs would generate more activation in left frontotemporal areas than inflected nouns. Our findings supported this hypothesis, with greater activation of this network for inflected verbs compared with inflected nouns. These results support the claim that form class is not a first-order organizing principle underlying the representation of words but rather interacts with the processes that operate over lexical representations.

Keywords: fMRI; inflection; noun; stem; verb.
Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?


This article has been cited by other articles:


Home page
 Cereb CortexHome page
T. M. Snijders, T. Vosse, G. Kempen, J. J.A. Van Berkum, K. M. Petersson, and P. Hagoort
Retrieval and Unification of Syntactic Structure in Sentence Comprehension: an fMRI Study Using Word-Category Ambiguity
Cereb Cortex, July 1, 2009; 19(7): 1493 - 1503.
[Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]


Disclaimer: Please note that abstracts for content published before 1996 were created through digital scanning and may therefore not exactly replicate the text of the original print issues. All efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, but the Publisher will not be held responsible for any remaining inaccuracies. If you require any further clarification, please contact our Customer Services Department.