The long term goal of the proposed research is to increase our understanding of the neurobiology of language, particularly the neural mechanisms that underlie the representation and access of words. The more immediate objective of the research is to understand the cortical organization of noun and verb processing. We will achieve this through a two-pronged experimental approach using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and repeated transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) in order to infer patterns of brain activation during processing of words of different grammatical categories. The first specific aim is to identify cortical regions that are differentially implicated in processing nouns and verbs. One set of experiments uses event-related fMRI to chart the areas of cortical activation differentially associated with noun and verb processing. Other experiments use rTMS to establish whether the areas of cortical activation play a central or a secondary role in this processing. The second specific aim is to distinguish those cortical regions that are primarily involved in processing the semantics of nouns and verbs from those that are implicated specifically in their grammatical processing. To this end, event-related fMRI experiments explore the effects of grammatical versus semantic factors on cortical activation patterns, and rTMS experiments determine whether the identified regions are essential for semantic and/or grammatical processing of words. The third specific aim is to determine the extent to which it is specifically grammatical category membership and not the different morphological processes undertaken with nouns and verbs that are represented in the regions of maximal cortical activation for nouns and verbs. The fMRI and rTMS experiments designed to achieve this goal involve comparison of performance on tasks that require regular morphological changes (jump/jumps) versus irregular (take/took) and/or no morphological changes. The fourth specific aim is to clarify the role that noun- and verb-specific processing areas play in the lexical retrieval tasks used to investigate the noun/verb distinction. This is addressed through the comparison of performance across the various task types used in the fMRI and rTMS experiments. The proposed research should increase our understanding of the cortical organization of noun and verb processing and provide the basis for explaining the causes of grammatical category deficits in various types of aphasia.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD)
Type
Research Project (R01)
Project #
5R01DC006842-04
Application #
7533995
Study Section
Language and Communication Study Section (LCOM)
Program Officer
Cooper, Judith
Project Start
2005-12-05
Project End
2010-11-30
Budget Start
2008-12-01
Budget End
2009-11-30
Support Year
4
Fiscal Year
2009
Total Cost
$432,886
Indirect Cost
Name
Harvard University
Department
Psychology
Type
Schools of Arts and Sciences
DUNS #
082359691
City
Cambridge
State
MA
Country
United States
Zip Code
02138
Janssen, Niels; Pajtas, Petra E; Caramazza, Alfonso (2014) Task influences on the production and comprehension of compound words. Mem Cognit 42:780-93
Almeida, Jorge; Mahon, Bradford Z; Zapater-Raberov, Veronica et al. (2014) Grasping with the eyes: the role of elongation in visual recognition of manipulable objects. Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci 14:319-35
Papeo, Liuba; Pascual-Leone, Alvaro; Caramazza, Alfonso (2013) Disrupting the brain to validate hypotheses on the neurobiology of language. Front Hum Neurosci 7:148
Bedny, M; Caramazza, A; Pascual-Leone, A et al. (2012) Typical neural representations of action verbs develop without vision. Cereb Cortex 22:286-93
Tadin, Duje; Silvanto, Juha; Pascual-Leone, Alvaro et al. (2011) Improved motion perception and impaired spatial suppression following disruption of cortical area MT/V5. J Neurosci 31:1279-83
Janssen, Niels; Pajtas, Petra E; Caramazza, Alfonso (2011) A set of 150 pictures with morphologically complex English compound names: norms for name agreement, familiarity, image agreement, and visual complexity. Behav Res Methods 43:478-90
Anzellotti, Stefano; Mahon, Bradford Z; Schwarzbach, Jens et al. (2011) Differential activity for animals and manipulable objects in the anterior temporal lobes. J Cogn Neurosci 23:2059-67
Willms, Joanna L; Shapiro, Kevin A; Peelen, Marius V et al. (2011) Language-invariant verb processing regions in Spanish-English bilinguals. Neuroimage 57:251-61
Navarrete, Eduardo; Mahon, Bradford Z; Caramazza, Alfonso (2010) The cumulative semantic cost does not reflect lexical selection by competition. Acta Psychol (Amst) 134:279-89
Mahon, B Z; Caramazza, A (2010) Judging semantic similarity: an event-related fMRI study with auditory word stimuli. Neuroscience 169:279-86

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