Neural Substrates of the Morphological Structure of Chinese Words

Compounding is the dominant morphological type in modern Chinese words; however, its brain mechanisms remain unspecified. Here, we aim to address this issue by manipulating three common morphological structures in Chinese disyllabic words in an fMRI study: parallel, biased, and monomorphemic. Behavioral analyses show no significant difference in reaction times and error rates among these three conditions. No difference in neural activation was observed in direct contrasts among these conditions in univariate contrast analyses. A support vector machine categorization analysis reveals that the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) is the only region in the frontotemporal network that can differentiate the parallel from the biased disyllabic words in neural activation patterns. This finding indicates that the LIFG is the core region responsible for morphological representation universally across different language modalities and morphological structures.