The Neural Mechanisms Of Nouns And Verbs In Chinese

Nouns and verbs are the most prevalent categories in human languages,which always constitute the core of sentences.Furthermore,these two categories also reflect the cognitive ability and cognitive mode of human being,respectively.Therefore,the mechanisms of nouns and verbs are essential for interdisciplinary studies.The part-of-speech plays a crucial role in the research of grammar.Since the era of ancient Greece and ancient India,Indo-European scholars in different periods have payed great attention to the boundaries and classification of grammatical categories,and obtained a rather consistent standard for dividing parts-of-speech.On the other hand,Indo-European scholars have utilized more and more diverse perspectives to study the mechanisms of the understanding of nouns and verbs.However,the studies of the mechanisms of Chinese nouns and verbs had been started much later.Meanwhile,the Chinese grammatical features determined many doubts for its part-of-speech theories,especially the boundary between nouns and verbs.By the methods of neurolinguistics,the relationship between nouns and verbs can be inspected insightfully.Linguistic phenomena in the brain can be reflected in an objective way,and their corresponding neural mechanisms can also be elaborated.Hence,quantitative analysis will be used to verify traditional linguistic theories.In the recent decades,an abundance of neurolingsuitic research indicates that the nouns and verbs of Indo-European languages posses distinct neural mechanisms,and the inherent semantic or syntactic difference between nouns and verbs are often thought to have caused this significant neural difference.While few neurolinguistic studies have focused on the mechanisms of Chinese nouns and verbs.Furthermore,almost no attention has been payed to the understanding of Chinese nouns and verbs on sentence level.In this research,an ERP experiment was applied to examine the neural potentials of Chinese nouns and verbs during sentence understanding for the first time.The study proved that nouns and verbs in Chinese also posses distinct neural mechanisms,for nouns and verbs have obviously different results in both behavioral and ERP experiments.As grammatical issues which would cause priming effects were excluded in the experiments,therefore,the significant semantic features between nouns and verbs were proved the reason why Chinese nouns and verbs have distinct neural mechanisms.In addition,some more decisive supra-linguistic issues are also discussed for the noun-verb neural distinction in this paper,including the cooperation of Broca's area and the motor area,the body-movement basis of the emergence and development of thinking,and hand gestures as a basis of the evolution of the original language.