Brain has areas devoted to learning nouns, verbs

LONDON: Scientists have recently shown that the part of the brain that gets activated when a person learns a new noun is different from the part used when a verb is learned.

Antoni Rodriguez-Fornells, psychologist from the University of Barcelona, along with Anna Mestres-Misse, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, and Thomas Munte from the Otto-von-Guericke University in Germany, have just confirmed neural differences in the map of the brain when a person learns new nouns and verbs.

The team knew that many patients with brain damage exhibit dissociation in processing these words, and that children learn nouns before verbs.

Based on these ideas, researchers devised an experiment to confirm whether these differences could be seen in the brain. They set people a test to learn new nouns and verbs, and recorded their neural reactions using functional magnetic resonance imaging.
Participants had to learn 80 new nouns and 80 new verbs. By doing this, the brain imaging showed that new nouns and new verbs activated different parts of the brain.