Noun and verb in the mind. An interdisciplinary approach

Abstract

In this paper we intend to provide aunified picture of the organization of knowledge about nouns and verbs in the mind emerging from the results of recent foundational studies that use av ariety of different experimental techniques and research methods rangingf rom processing experiments, languagea cquisition and aphasia studies to more advanced neurophysiological and neuroimagings tudies. Each of the authors of the articles discussed in the present paper attempts to show that the distinction between nouns and verbs originates only(or mainly) at one of the following levels: the conceptual-semantic, the lexical or the morphological level. Our overview points to ac onclusiont hat the knowledge about verbs and nouns in the mind cannot be attributed to as ingle level, but rather it seems to be the case that it is organized in the form of ad istributed network of specialized functions in which manyp rocesses related to noun or verb processing mayh appen in ap arallel fashion. Even though in some respects the presented studies do not entirelyl ead to ac oherent picture of what happens in the brain when people process nouns and verbs, it is still possiblet of ind overlapping results. Fore xample, nominal and verbalc oncepts of objects or actions are processedinthe vicinity of the visual and motor cortex respectively.L exical (orthographic and phonological) representations of nouns and verbs are stored in mid temporala nd left frontal cortex respectively. Noun-and verb-dependent morphological operations happen in left anterior occipitotemporal gyrus and prefrontal/frontotemporalc ortex respectively.

Nouns and verbs in the linguistic environment of Argentinian toddlers: Socioeconomic and context-related differences

“…While nouns prototypically refer to people, things or phenomena and function as arguments in a sentence, verbs are commonly associated with actions or states and function as the glue that holds arguments together (Bowerman & Brown, 2008). Nouns and verbs differ with respect to their morphological, lexical and syntactic behavior and this has implications in language processing (Błaszczak & Klimek-Jankowska, 2015). Hence, it is of utmost importance to consider the lexical composition of the language that children have to process to make sense of their environments (Nelson, 2007).…”