title: An fMRI study of concreteness effects in spoken word recognition.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Evidence for the brain mechanisms recruited when processing concrete versus abstract concepts has been largely derived from studies employing visual stimuli. The tasks and baseline contrasts used have also involved varying degrees of lexical processing. This study investigated the neural basis of the concreteness effect during spoken word recognition and employed a lexical decision task with a novel pseudoword condition.
  
  
  METHODS
  The participants were seventeen healthy young adults (9 females). The stimuli consisted of (a) concrete, high imageability nouns, (b) abstract, low imageability nouns and (c) opaque legal pseudowords presented in a pseudorandomised, event-related design. Activation for the concrete, abstract and pseudoword conditions was analysed using anatomical regions of interest derived from previous findings of concrete and abstract word processing.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Behaviourally, lexical decision reaction times for the concrete condition were significantly faster than both abstract and pseudoword conditions and the abstract condition was significantly faster than the pseudoword condition (p < 0.05). The region of interest analysis showed significantly greater activity for concrete versus abstract conditions in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate and bilaterally in the angular gyrus. There were no significant differences between abstract and concrete conditions in the left superior temporal gyrus or inferior frontal gyrus.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  These findings confirm the involvement of the bilateral angular gyrus, left posterior cingulate and left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in retrieving concrete versus abstract concepts during spoken word recognition. Significant activity was also elicited by concrete words relative to pseudowords in the left fusiform and left anterior middle temporal gyrus. These findings confirm the involvement of a widely distributed network of brain regions that are activated in response to the spoken recognition of concrete but not abstract words. Our findings are consistent with the proposal that distinct brain regions are engaged as convergence zones and enable the binding of supramodal input.
authors.affiliation: Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital, University of Queensland Centre for Clinical Research, Level 3 Building 71/918, Herston 4029, QLD, Australia. t.roxbury@uq.edu.au.
authors.forename: Tracy
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Roxbury
authors.forename: Katie
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: McMahon
authors.forename: David A
authors.initials: DA
authors.lastname: Copland
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D003657:Decision Making / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D021641:Recognition, Psychology / Q000502:physiology*; D013060:Speech / Q000502:physiology*; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult