Representation of the verb's argument-structure in the human brain

The magnetoencephalogram was recorded while 22 native German-speaking adults saw 130 German verbs, presented one at a time for 150 ms each in experiment 1. Verb-evoked electromagnetic responses at 250 – 300 ms after stimulus onset, analyzed in source space, were higher in the left middle temporal gyrus for verbs that take only one argument, relative to two- and three-argument verbs. In experiment 2, the same verbs (presented in different order) were preceded by a proper name specifying the subject of the verb. This produced additional activation between 350 and 450 ms in or near the left inferior frontal gyrus, activity being larger and peaking earlier for one-argument verbs that required no further arguments to form a complete sentence.Localization of sources of activity suggests that the activation in temporal and frontal regions varies with the degree by which representations of an event as a part of the verbs' semantics are completed during parsing.Most verbs describe events with one or more participants [1]. The verb's argument structure defines the number and relationships of participants needed for a complete event. For "Peter gives Jim a book", linguistic theorizing [2] would ascribe participants three thematic roles: the agent (Peter), the recipient (Jim) and the theme (the book). The entry in the mental lexicon for a verb like "give" must incorporate such information in addition to phonetic and orthographic information.The cortical processing of argument structures has been investigated mostly in designs employing entire sentences, wh-questions (that is questions starting with 'what', 'which', who' or else), or sentences including syntactic or semantic violations [3-6,2]. Imaging studies suggest that the middle temporal gyrus (MTG) and the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG, BA 45/47) of the left hemisphere [7-9] play a crucial role in this processing. In particular, the left IFG (BA 44/45) has been shown to be active when grammatically complex sentences that req