Athlete or athletic? Limited differential brain activation in person descriptions using nouns or adjectives

Do differences between the syntactic categories of nouns and adjectives for describing persons translate into different patterns of brain activation? In this fMRI study, we compared reading person and object descriptions denoted by nouns or adjectives. Previous behavioral studies found that nouns, describing the more abstract construct of social categories, compared to adjectives, describing the more concrete construct of personality traits, have an impact on the inferences made about a person. Additionally, previous neuroimaging findings suggest that abstract constructs recruit a different pattern of brain activation, compared to more concrete constructs. Participants read sentences describing a protagonist by means of a noun or an adjective, as well as sentences describing objects through a noun or an adjective. The results revealed that reading nouns as opposed to adjectives showed increased activation in the left lingual gyrus for persons, and additionally in the right lingual gyrus for objects. The results indicate that there are limited differences in the processing of nouns and adjectives when describing persons.