The representation of category typicality in the frontal cortex and its cross-linguistic variations

Abstract

When asked to judge the membership of typical (e.g., car) vs. atypical (e.g., train) pictures of a category (e.g., vehicle), native English (N=18) and native Chinese speakers (N=18) showed distinctive patterns of brain activity despite showing similar behavioral responses. Moreover, these differences were mainly due to the amount and pervasiveness of category information linguistically embedded in the everyday names of the items in the respective languages, with important differences across languages in how pervasive category labels are embedded in item-level terms. Nonetheless, the left inferior frontal gyrus and the bilateral medial frontal gyrus are the most consistent neural correlates of category typicality that persist across languages and linguistic cues. These data together suggest that both cross- and within-language differences in the explicitness of category information have strong effects on the nature of categorization processes performed by the brain.

Keywords: Categorization; Cross-linguistic; Frontal cortex; Typicality effect; fMRI.