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The present research investigated the neural correlates of nominal inflection and aimed at disclosing their possible link with the frequency distribution of noun inflectional features: grammatical gender, inflectional suffixes and inflectional classes. The properties of the Italian nominal system were exploited since it allows to explore exhaustively fine-grained phenomena in the inflectional processing. An event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment was carried out where Italian masculine and feminine nouns were visually presented to 50 healthy participants in an overt inflectional task: the generation of the plural from the singular and vice versa. The grammatical gender and the citation form suffix of nouns were manipulated in a factorial design. Functional data showed that inflectional operations for nouns activate an extensive cortical network involving the left inferior and right superior frontal gyri, the left and right middle temporal gyri, the posterior cingulate cortex and the cerebellum. Activations were variably modulated by the distributional features of gender-dependent properties of nouns. Particularly, cortical activity increased during inflectional operations for small and/or scarcely consistent inflectional classes. These findings demonstrate the relevance of specific morphological (inflectional suffixes) and distributional features (size and consistency) shared by groups of words (inflectional classes) in a language, particularly when implementing cognitive operations required for language processing.

Probabilistic language models are increasingly used to provide neural representations of linguistic features under naturalistic settings. Word surprisal models can be applied to continuous fMRI recordings during task-free listening of narratives, to detect regions linked to language prediction and comprehension. Here, to this purpose, a novel semantics-weighted lexical surprisal is applied to naturalistic fMRI data. FMRI was performed at 3 Tesla in 31 subjects during task-free listening to a 12-minute audiobook played in both original and word-reversed (control) version. Lexical-only and semantics-weighted lexical surprisal models were estimated for the original and control word series. The two series were alternatively chosen to build the predictor of interest in the first-level general linear model and were compared in the second-level (group) analysis. The addition of the surprisal predictor to the stimulus-related predictors significantly improved the fitting of the neural signal. In average, the semantics-weighted model yielded lower surprisal values and, in some areas, better fitting of the fMRI data compared to the lexical-only model. The two models produced both overlapping and distinct activations: while lexical-only surprisal activated secondary auditory areas in the superior temporal gyri and the cerebellum, semantics-weighted surprisal additionally activated the left inferior frontal gyrus. These results confirm the usefulness of surprisal models in the naturalistic fMRI analysis of linguistic processes and suggest that the use of semantic information may increase the sensitivity of a probabilistic language model in higher-order language-related areas, with possible implications for future naturalistic fMRI studies of language under normal and (clinically or pharmacologically) modified conditions.

Social networks have renewed the ways audiences experience art and its spaces. The phenomenon concerns visitors, communicating their art experience through social media, and the artistic institutions, communicating their spaces and events. Sharing contents is a practice of fruition that allows the experience to be textualized. Our research focuses on how Igers represent themselves and their experience at museums, through a qualitative and quantitative description of the data collected. Our approach can support art institutions’ communication strategies.

Idioms have been traditionally described as fixed expressions, highly restricted in their realization. Corpus and experimental studies, however, have shown that they are more variable than previously thought. The issue of idiom syntax has received a renewed interest, since it also addresses the problem of how idioms are mentally stored. Another relevant topic is the role played by literal plausibility of idioms, which refers to the likelihood of an idiomatic expression for a plausible literal interpretation. In this research, we addressed both topics, by means of three cross-modal priming experiments, where canonical idioms and variants (i.e., passive form and left dislocation) were followed by words related to the idiomatic meaning of sentences (break the ice-embarrassment) or literal meaning of single words (break the ice-cold). The results seem to indicate that idioms do not have a special status in terms of syntactic variability: they behave like literal sentences and do not lose their idiomatic interpretation if manipulated. Moreover, data reveal processing differences between literally plausible and implausible idioms. The results are discussed within current theories about idiom representation.

The generation of regular and irregular inflected verb-forms has been taken as a crucial test between models of inflection in the mental lexicon, namely approaches which invoke different mechanisms for regular and irregular forms (rule-based procedures vs. recovery of whole forms stored in an associative network) and accounts which postulate a single procedure for all forms. An alternative hypothesis suggests that inflectional processes are explained by membership of words to clusters, for instance, Italian inflectional classes (conjugations). In a behavioural and a rapid event-related fMRI experiment, participants overtly generated the past participle of verbs from the three Italian conjugations. Results showed that the cognitive operations and the neural substrate underlying inflectional processes rely on specific properties of inflectional classes. Different patterns of cortical activations elicited by verbs from different conjugations were detected for the first time in the left middle frontal gyrus, left pre-supplementary motor area and left anterior cingulate cortex.

We report a picture-word interference (PWI) experiment conducted in Italian where target verbs were used to name pictures in presence of semantically related and unrelated distracters. The congruency of grammatical class between targets and distracters was manipulated and nouns and verbs were used as distracters. Consistently with previous studies, an expected semantic interference effect was observed but, interestingly, such an effect does not equally apply to target-distracter pairs sharing or not grammatical class information. This outcome seems to corroborate the hypothesis of the intervention of grammatical constraints in word production as explored in the PWI task. Questo lavoro descrive un esperimento di interferenza figura-parola sull’ italiano in cui le figure dovevano essere denominate usando verbi in presenza di distrattori semanticamente collegati o non collegati alla figura. È stata manipolata anche la congruenza di classe grammaticale tra target e distrattori; questi ultimi nella metà dei casi erano nomi e nell’altra verbi. In linea con studi precedenti, abbiamo ottenuto un effetto di interferenza semantica; il dato interessante è che quest’ultimo effetto interessa in modo differente le coppie target-distrattore congruenti o non congruenti per classe grammaticale. Questo risultato sembra corroborare l’ipotesi che nella di produzione di parole esplorata attraverso il compito di interferenza figura-parola giochino un ruolo le proprietà grammaticali delle parole.

Il lavoro descrive un database lessicale composto da 100 nomi e 100 verbi italiani. Per ciascun nome e verbo il database rende disponibili informazioni sulle proprietà formali, distribuzionali, morfo-fonologiche, semantiche e sintattiche e i valori relativi al tempo medio e all’accuratezza di riconoscimento. Il database è utile nelle aree di ricerca in cui sia necessario manipolare e controllare le variabili linguistiche che influenzano il processing lessicale delle parole. The present paper describes a lexical database containing 100 Italian nouns and 100 Italian verbs. For each noun and verb the database provides information about formal, distributional, semantic, morphophonological and syntactic characteristics and average recognition times and accuracy. This set of norms is supposed to be helpful in research areas where it is necessary to manipulate and to control for linguistic variables affecting lexical processing of words.

The hypothesis that grammatical class information is represented in the mental lexicon and that it is activated during lexical access has generated a wide literature about the differences between nouns and verbs. However, the available evidences are discordant.In this study we tried to disentangle grammatical class effects from semantic categories effects during visual word recognition by exploiting the semantic priming paradigm.Semantically related prime-target pair were arranged. They could share (verb-verb) or not (noun-verb) grammatical class information. A third condition was included where noun primes and verb targets had both an action as a referent (delitti/uccide, crimes/he-she kills). Only prime/target pairs sharing grammatical class information showed significant semantic priming effects.Results are compatible with the hypothesis that grammatical class is an organizational criterion in the mental lexicon and it is activated during lexical access. L’ipotesi secondo cui l’informazione di classe grammaticale sia rappresentata nel lessico mentale e attivata durante l’accesso lessicale ha dato origine a un’ampia letteratura sulle differenze tra nomi e verbi. La base empirica è, tuttavia, ancora incerta.In questo studio abbiamo usato il paradigma del priming semantico per distinguere il ruolo della classe grammaticale da quello della categoria semantica di appartenenza delle parole in un compito di riconoscimento visivo.Sono state impiegate coppie prime-target semanticamente collegate che condividevano (verbo-verbo) o meno (nome-verbo) la classe grammaticale. In una terza condizione abbiamo usato prime-nome e target -verbo che avevano entrambi un referente appartenente alla categoria semantica delle azioni (delitti/uccide).L’effetto di priming semantico è risultato significativo solo per le coppie prime-target che condividevano l’informazione di classe grammaticale.I dati sono compatibili con l’idea che la classe grammaticale sia un criterio organizzativo nel lessico mentale e che sia attivata durante l’accesso lessicale.