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Abstract
A dissociation between noun and verb processing has been found in brain damaged patients
leading to the proposal that different word classes are supported by different neural
representations. This notion is supported by the facts that children acquire nouns
faster and adults usually perform better for nouns than verbs in a range of tasks.
In the present study, we simulated word learning in a variant of the human simulation
paradigm that provided only linguistic context information and required young healthy
adults to map noun or verb meanings to novel words. The mapping of a meaning associated
with a new-noun and a new-verb recruited different brain regions as revealed by functional
magnetic resonance imaging. While new-nouns showed greater activation in the left
fusiform gyrus, larger activation was observed for new-verbs in the left posterior
middle temporal gyrus and left inferior frontal gyrus (opercular part). Furthermore,
the activation in several regions of the brain (for example the bilateral hippocampus
and bilateral putamen) was positively correlated with the efficiency of new-noun but
not new-verb learning. The present results suggest that the same brain regions that
have previously been associated with the representation of meaning of nouns and verbs
are also associated with the mapping of such meanings to novel words, a process needed
in second language learning.
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