[PS-2.49] Neural correlates of morpho-syntactic complexity of Verb: an fMRI study in Persian

Nilipour, R. . 1 & Momenian, M. . 2

1 Department of Speech Therapy, University of Social Welfare and Rehabilitation Sciences, Tehran, Iran
2 Department of Applied Linguistics, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran

The purpose of this presentation is to report an fMRI study conducted to determine the neural correlates of Persian verb morpho-syntactic complexity in comparison with Persian nouns. Persian is a language with a more complex morpho-syntactic structure compared with several Indo-European and Asian languages. The subjects were adult educated native speakers of Persian. Object and action picture stimuli were selected from Druks and Masterson Object and Action Naming Battery adapted for Persian (Nilipour, 2015). The subjects were required to perform a simple sentence completion covert task on each stimulus in the scanner. SPM12 was used to analyze the imaging data. The results of the imaging data analysis revealed that middle temporal gyrus (bilaterally) could be a potential candidate responsible for the representation and processing of the morpho-syntactic complexity associated with Persian verbs in the brain. The results will be discussed in light of other studies and models on the dissociation between noun and verb. This finding may be an indication of semantic and grammatical differences in the neurological dissociation between noun and verb, at least for Persian.