Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland.
Department of Neurology, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland.
Hum Brain Mapp. 2018 Dec;39(12):4925-4938. doi: 10.1002/hbm.24334. Epub 2018 Aug 18.
The distinction between nouns and verbs is a language universal. Yet, functional neuroimaging studies comparing noun and verb processing have yielded inconsistent findings, ranging from a complete frontal(verb)-temporal(noun) dichotomy to a complete overlap in activation patterns. The current study addressed the debate about neural distinctions between nouns and verbs by conducting an activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analysis of probabilistic cytoarchitectonic maps. Two levels of analysis were conducted: simple effects (Verbs vs. Baseline, Nouns vs. Baseline), and direct comparisons (Verbs vs. Nouns, Nouns vs. Verbs). Nouns were uniquely associated with a left medial temporal cluster (BA37). Activation foci for verbs included extensive inferior frontal (BA44-47) and mid-temporal (BA22, 21) regions in the left hemisphere. These findings confirm that the two grammatical classes have distinct neural architecture in supra-modal brain regions. Further, nouns and verbs overlapped in a small left lateral inferior temporal activation cluster (BA37), which is a region for modality-independent, grammatical class-independent lexical representations. These findings are most consistent with the view that as one acquires language, linguistic representations for a lexical category shift from the modality specific cortices which represent prototypical members of that category (e.g., motion for verbs) to abstract amodal representations in close proximity to modality specific cortices.
名词和动词之间的区别是一种语言普遍性。然而，将医学专业学术文献翻译为简体中文时，比较名词和动词处理的功能神经影像学研究得出的结果并不一致，从完全的额叶（动词）-颞叶（名词）二分法到激活模式的完全重叠。本研究通过对概率细胞构筑图进行激活似然估计 (ALE) 元分析，解决了关于名词和动词之间神经区别的争论。进行了两个层次的分析：简单效应（动词与基线相比，名词与基线相比）和直接比较（动词与名词相比，名词与动词相比）。名词与左侧内侧颞叶簇（BA37）唯一相关。动词的激活焦点包括左侧额下回（BA44-47）和中颞（BA22、21）区域的广泛激活。这些发现证实了这两个语法类别在超模态大脑区域具有独特的神经结构。此外，名词和动词在左侧外侧颞叶的一个小激活簇（BA37）中重叠，这是一个与模态无关、语法类别无关的词汇代表区域。这些发现与以下观点最为一致，即随着人们习得语言，词汇类别代表的语言表达从代表该类别的典型成员的特定模态皮质（例如动词的运动）转移到与特定模态皮质接近的抽象非模态表示。
