Universitat de Barcelona, Spain.
J Cogn Neurosci. 2011 Jan;23(1):106-18. doi: 10.1162/jocn.2010.21414.
The present study investigated the neural correlates of the processing of abstract (low imageability) verbs. An extensive body of literature has investigated concrete versus abstract nouns but little is known about how abstract verbs are processed. Spanish abstract verbs including emotion verbs (e.g., amar, "to love"; molestar, "to annoy") were compared to concrete verbs (e.g., llevar, "to carry"; arrastrar, "to drag"). Results indicated that abstract verbs elicited stronger activity in regions previously associated with semantic retrieval such as inferior frontal, anterior temporal, and posterior temporal regions, and that concrete and abstract activation networks (compared to that of pseudoverbs) were partially distinct, with concrete verbs eliciting more posterior activity in these regions. In contrast to previous studies investigating nouns, verbs strongly engage both left and right inferior frontal gyri, suggesting, as previously found, that right prefrontal cortex aids difficult semantic retrieval. Together with previous evidence demonstrating nonverbal conceptual roles for the active regions as well as experiential content for abstract word meanings, our results suggest that abstract verbs impose greater demands on semantic retrieval or property integration, and are less consistent with the view that abstract words recruit left-lateralized regions because they activate verbal codes or context, as claimed by proponents of the dual-code theory. Moreover, our results are consistent with distributed accounts of semantic memory because distributed networks may coexist with varying retrieval demands.
本研究调查了处理抽象（低形象性）动词的神经关联。大量文献研究了具体名词和抽象名词，但对于抽象动词的处理方式知之甚少。本研究将西班牙语的抽象动词（如 amar，“爱”；molestar，“烦恼”）与具体动词（如 llevar，“携带”；arrastrar，“拖拽”）进行了比较。结果表明，抽象动词在以前与语义检索相关的区域（如额下回、前颞叶和后颞叶）中引起了更强的活动，并且具体和抽象的激活网络（与伪动词相比）部分不同，具体动词在这些区域中引起了更多的后活动。与以前研究名词的研究不同，动词强烈地激活了左右额下回，这表明正如之前发现的那样，右前额叶皮层有助于困难的语义检索。与先前的证据一起证明了主动区域的非语言概念角色以及抽象词意义的经验内容，我们的结果表明，抽象动词对语义检索或属性集成提出了更高的要求，并且不太符合双重代码理论支持者所主张的观点，即抽象词是因为它们激活了语言代码或上下文而调用左侧区域。此外，我们的结果与语义记忆的分布式理论一致，因为分布式网络可能与不同的检索需求共存。
