, 2000, Gainotti, 2000 and Pulvermüller, Lutzenberger et al., 1999). Therefore, although noun/verb dissociations in patient populations and differential brain activation to these categories have been reported in the studies above, it is unclear to what degree such dissociation depends on linguistic and semantic features of these word groups. In an attempt to take these confounds into consideration, Bedny et al. (2008) focused on nouns and verbs varying in semantic features, especially in their semantic relationship to motion

perception. We would like to consider these findings in detail as, despite a similar design, Bedny and colleagues’ stimulus selection along with their results dramatically differ from those reported here. Contrary to previous studies (Martin et al. 1996), these authors reported that activity in middle temporal regions close to motion-sensitive Selleck STA-9090 areas “responded preferentially to verbs relative to nouns, even when the nouns have higher visual-motion properties” (than verbs) (p. 11352) and hence suggested that “concepts… are organised according to conceptual

(lexical) properties” (p. 11347). In their attempt to tease apart lexical and semantic factors, these authors controlled semantic aspects related to visually perceived motion, grouping together animal nouns and action verbs as “high motion” items in spite of their fundamental differences with regard to a range of semantic dimensions. This neglect and lack of control for semantic aspects of Carnitine dehydrogenase verb and Selleckchem LDK378 noun stimuli is a major shortcoming, as previous work has documented brain activation differences

related to semantic action- vs. object-relatedness, manipulability of referent objects of nouns, or action-relatedness of verbs (see next section; Brambati et al., 2006, Damasio et al., 2001, Martin and Weisberg, 2003, Pulvermüller et al., 2009 and Tranel et al., 2005). Bedny’s comparison of “high-motion” noun and verb categories, namely animal names and action verbs (such as “sheep” vs. ”grasp”), is problematic, as we have demonstrated in previous work that many animal words lack action-semantic links and, correspondingly, fail to elicit action-related brain activity, whereas action verbs, which represent the prototype of action-related lexical materials, activate cortical motor systems along with middle-temporal cortex (Moseley et al., 2012). It has indeed been suggested that the middle-temporal activation might reflect visual motion processing, but there is so far no firm proof for this hypothesis and general action-relatedness provides at least one alternative cognitive-semantic feature that may be reflected (Kiefer et al. 2012). Because likely semantic determinants of their middle-temporal activations were not sufficiently documented, the noun/verb difference in brain activation observed by Bedny et al. cannot be seen as unrelated to semantics. With greater control of semantic stimulus properties related to action and perception, our present findings as summarised in Fig.