Hernández Mireia, Fairhall Scott L, Lenci Alessandro, Baroni Marco, Caramazza Alfonso
Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
J Cogn Neurosci. 2014 Aug;26(8):1829-39. doi: 10.1162/jocn_a_00598. Epub 2014 Feb 24.
Verbs and nouns are fundamental units of language, but their neural instantiation remains poorly understood. Neuropsychological research has shown that nouns and verbs can be damaged independently of each other, and neuroimaging research has found that several brain regions respond differentially to the two word classes. However, the semantic-lexical properties of verbs and nouns that drive these effects remain unknown. Here we show that the most likely candidate is predication: a core lexical feature involved in binding constituent arguments (boy, candies) into a unified syntactic-semantic structure expressing a proposition (the boy likes the candies). We used functional neuroimaging to test whether the intrinsic "predication-building" function of verbs is what drives the verb-noun distinction in the brain. We first identified verb-preferring regions with a localizer experiment including verbs and nouns. Then, we examined whether these regions are sensitive to transitivity--an index measuring its tendency to select for a direct object. Transitivity is a verb-specific property lying at the core of its predication function. Neural activity in the left posterior middle temporal and inferior frontal gyri correlates with transitivity, indicating sensitivity to predication. This represents the first evidence that grammatical class preference in the brain is driven by a word's function to build predication structures.
动词和名词是语言的基本单位，但其神经实例化仍知之甚少。神经心理学研究表明，名词和动词可能会相互独立受损，神经影像学研究发现，几个脑区对这两类词的反应存在差异。然而，驱动这些效应的动词和名词的语义-词汇属性仍然未知。在这里，我们表明最有可能的候选因素是谓语：一种核心词汇特征，涉及将成分论元（男孩、糖果）绑定到一个表达命题（男孩喜欢糖果）的统一句法-语义结构中。我们使用功能神经影像学来测试动词固有的“谓语构建”功能是否是大脑中区分动词和名词的驱动因素。我们首先通过一个包括动词和名词的定位实验确定了偏好动词的区域。然后，我们检查这些区域是否对及物性敏感——及物性是衡量其选择直接宾语倾向的一个指标。及物性是动词特有的属性，位于其谓语功能的核心。左后颞中回和额下回的神经活动与及物性相关，表明对谓语敏感。这是大脑中语法类别偏好由词构建谓语结构的功能驱动的首个证据。
