Document Type : Research Paper
Authors
1 Department of Linguisticsِ Literature Faculty, Alzahra University, Tehran, Iran
2 Linguistics Department, Faculty of Literature, Alzahra University, Tehran, Iran
3 Institute for Cognitive Science Studies, Tehran, Iran
Abstract
The main objective of this study was to identify active brain regions during the auditory processing of various morphological forms of nouns in Persian and to examine the effect of the plural morpheme in this procedure. This study was designed to address these questions: Which brain regions are activated during the auditory processing of simple and non-simple nouns in Persian? How does the presence or absence of plural inflectional morphemes influence the activated regions? This study involved 20 healthy, right-handed native Persian speakers with an average age of 30.8 years. The participants are asked to listen to a block-design task, including 12 auditory-only stimuli lasting 20s each, with a 5-second rest between them. The distribution of the target words in each block was randomized, and the words were presented in the same order for all participants. The structural images were obtained using a 3D T1-MPRAGE sequence, and the functional images were acquired using EPI. The analysis was performed using GLM and SLA. The results indicated that the activated regions in simple nouns corresponded to motor areas, in derivation nouns to complex language processing areas, and in compound nouns to areas associated with emotional and cognitive functions. The processing of data related to derivation and compound nouns was observed across widespread brain regions, encompassing both language-processing regions and memory-related areas. Furthermore, this study demonstrates that Persian plural suffixes lead to an extensive activation and an increase in z-score. Thes changes are more prominent in areas associated with cognitive and language processing.
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