Distinctive neural correlates of morphosyntactic processing of Chinese nouns and verbs

Abstract

Identifying distinct neural correlates of nouns and verbs processing at semantic and morpho-syntactic levels is difficult in languages rich in inflection morphology as each lexical item carries both semantic and morphological properties. Chinese has little inflection and its morpho-syntactic operations mainly involve morpho-syllables including aspect markers for verbs and nominal classifiers for nouns. Yu et al. (2011) found greater activation for verbs than nouns in LpSTG&MTG across semantic tasks and the current study explored neural substrates of Chinese morphosyntax by contrasting these two types of processes. In a sentence grammaticality judgment task, aspect markers induced greater activation in LIFG (boundary between BA45 and BA47) and right precentral, in addition to LpSTG&MTG, while processing of classifiers was associated with two LIFG regions (BA 45, BA 47) as well as bilateral calcarine and lingual gyri. These results thus reveal distinctive neural bases underlying Chinese noun and verb processing at different linguistic levels.