The Conceptual Brain: Telicity modulates neural activity in verb processing cortical areas.

Here we show that implicit processing of telic versus atelic verbs modulates neural activity in the left posterior middle temporal gyrus (lpMTG), a brain region involved in verb processing and representation. The telicity effect is independent of other verb features, such as number of arguments and animacy, as the selection of verbs is balanced across categories, potential effects of other lexical properties are controlled for and the task design covertly assesses the representation of telicity. Previous studies have shown verb-selectivity in lpMTG, and damage to the same region resulted in impaired verb processing (Tranel et al., 2001; Aggujaro et al., 2006). Nevertheless, neither a referential semantic account (e.g., motion verbs, such as "to walk" vs. mental activities, such as "to talk") nor a grammatical class-based account could explain the verb effect in this region (Crepaldi et al., 2011). Our findings provide the first evidence that the role of lpMTG in processing verbs is related to the representation of telicity, which, like other lexical semantic properties, is shared by verbs independently of their referential semantics.