Neurotopographie der Speicherung und Verarbeitung von lexiko-semantisch und syntaktisch unterschiedlichen Verb-Klassen

Abstract

German light verbs, a subset of German function verbs, can be interpreted in two different ways: The one and the same morphological form can hold for a concrete or an abstract meaning. These so called light verbs are underspecified regarding specific semantic and syntactic properties, compared to heavy verbs which refer to concrete action. The present study explored whether distinct processing of light versus heavy verbs become manifest in the spatial temporal dynamics of brain activity thus, how the human brain solves that kind of ambiguity while parsing a light verb.<br />Differences in the magnetic flux density between verb categories and context types are manifest in the differentiation between light and heavy verbs on the one hand, and the role of the sentence context in the other hand.<br />When presenting light and heavy verbs in isolation or with personal pronoun, differences between light and heavy verbs were evident between 95-135 ms and 160-200 ms: heavy verbs evoke stronger activity than light verbs.<br />The sentence context matters from 270 ms onwards. When presenting light verbs in concrete- versus verbal-noun-context, activity differences were manifest between 270-340 ms, 445-480 ms and 500-600 ms in left temporal regions. Once again, light verbs in concrete-action-reading lead to stronger activation than light verbs in verbal-noun-context.<br />Present results provide neurolinguistic evidence that the characteristics of light verbs become manifest in distinct cortical processes relative to verbs with unambiguous (heavy) meaning. The brain distinguishes different meaning of the same word when presented in different contexts.<br />Linguistically, the meaning of a single word results from semantic and syntactic features of the complements co-occurring within a sentence. Sentential and word meaning are thus not only part of ones word meaning.