Lexical-semantic variables such as word frequency, imageability and age of acquisition have long been studied in order to shed light on the cognitive processes underlying the cognitive performance of normal and aphasic speakers (Nickels & Howard, 1995). However, little is known about the role of these variables in Chinese.

Previous research strongly suggests that morphologically complex words are recognized in terms of their constituent morphemes. A question thus arises as to how the recognition system codes for morpheme position within words, given that it needs to distinguish morphological anagrams like overhang and hangover. The present study focused specifically on whether the recognition of suffixes occurs in a position-specific fashion.

The wide variety of techniques and tasks used to study the neural correlates of noun and verb processing has resulted in a body of inconsistent evidence. We performed a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment to detect grammatical class effects that generalize across tasks. A total of 12 participants undertook a grammatical-class switching task (GCST), in which they were presented with a noun (or a verb) and were asked to retrieve the corresponding verb (or noun), and a classical picture naming task (PNT) widely used in the previous aphasiological and imaging literature.

Many studies on aphasia have described disproportioned impairment of either verbs or nouns and have broached the issue of mental implementation of the grammatical class distinction.