Division of Speech and Hearing Sciences, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR.
Neuroimage. 2011 Oct 1;58(3):912-22. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2011.06.039. Epub 2011 Jun 29.
Numerous studies using various techniques and methodologies have demonstrated distinctive responses to nouns and verbs both at the behavioral and neurological levels. However, since the great majority of these studies involved tasks employing pictorial stimuli and languages with rich inflectional morphology, it is not clear whether word class effects resulted from semantic differences between objects and actions or different inflectional operations associated with the two word classes. Such shortcomings were addressed in this study by using a language with impoverished inflectional morphology - Chinese. Both concrete and abstract words were included, while controlling for nuisance variables between the two word classes, including imageability, word frequency, age-of-acquisition, and number of stroke. Participants were asked to judge the semantic relatedness of noun or verb pairs by pressing different buttons. The results revealed specific neural correlates for verb class in left lateral temporal and inferior frontal regions. Furthermore, the patterns of neural distribution of nouns and verbs were consistent with observations from Indo-European languages. Plausible accounts for neural separation of word classes were considered.
大量使用不同技术和方法的研究表明，名词和动词在行为和神经水平上都有独特的反应。然而，由于绝大多数这些研究涉及到使用图画刺激和具有丰富屈折形态的语言的任务，因此不清楚词类效应是否是由于对象和动作之间的语义差异还是与这两个词类相关的不同屈折操作引起的。本研究通过使用屈折形态贫瘠的语言——中文，解决了这些缺点。包括具体和抽象词，同时控制两个词类之间的干扰变量，包括形象性、词频、习得年龄和笔画数。要求参与者通过按下不同按钮来判断名词或动词对的语义相关性。结果表明，在左颞叶和下额叶区域存在动词类的特定神经关联。此外，名词和动词的神经分布模式与印欧语言的观察结果一致。考虑了对词类进行神经分离的合理解释。
