On the instantiation of grammatical categories in the brain

Kevin Alfred Shapiro

The expressive capacity of language derives from grammatical rules, which combine items from a fixed set of meaningful elements (morphemes and words) into sentences of theoretically unbounded complexity. How the brain retrieves words from memory, and then assigns them to grammatical operations of the appropriate type, is a key question in the neurobiology of language. These three papers explore the neural regions engaged in operations that apply to nouns and verbs, the principal grammatical categories in every human language. The first paper reports the case of a brain-damaged subject, R.C., who is more impaired at producing grammatical forms of words and pseudo-words used as verbs ( he judges, he wugs ) than of the same words used as nouns ( the judges, the wugs ). This pattern constitutes the first clear demonstration that grammatical knowledge about verbs can be selectively...