Brain areas underlying retrieval of nouns and verbs: Grammatical class and task demand effects

Journal: 

Brain and Language, 103, 156-157

Date: 

November, 2007

Authors: 

Berlingeri, M., Crepaldi, D., Roberti, R., Scialfa, G., Luzzatti, C., & Paulesu, E.

Current data on the neural correlates of noun and verb processing are inconsistent as studies using different imaging techniques and/or different tasks have provided remarkably different results. Verbs have been reported to be associated with left frontal activity (Shapiro et al., 2005), with left parietal regions (Martin, Haxby, Lalonde, Wiggs, & Ungerleider, 2005) and with activation in the inferior temporal regions (Tranel, Martin, Damasio, Grabowski, & Hichwa, 2005). Furthermore, past neuroimaging evidence highlights a crucial role of the left inferior frontal gyrus in noun processing (Tyler et al., 2003), as well as a crucial role of the inferior temporal (Bedny & Thompson-Schill, 2006) and occipito-temporal (Fujimaki et al., 1999) areas. We developed an fMRI study to clarify this issue by assessing task-independent and task-dependent grammatical-class-specific effects during lexical retrieval tasks.