Grammatical class distinction in neural representation of Chinese word forms

Abstract

INTRODUCTION:The discovery of noun or verb specific impairment in selective modalities (e.g., Caramazza & Hillis, 1991; Hillis & Caramazza, 1995) in brain-damaged patients prompted the proposal of representation of word class distinction at the word form level. Thus far, such a hypothesis has not been well testified by neuroimaging studies as seen in the comprehensive review of investigations of grammatical class effects based on lexical decision, a task mainly taps lexical form processing (Crepaldi et al., 2010). In particular, Li and his colleagues (Li et al., 2004; Chan et al., 2008; Yang et al., 2011) using Chinese two-character words reported an absence of word class effects. However, their null results could be due to the failure in controlling relevant psycholinguistic factors and more critically the unity in word class between the lexical and sublexi…