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seen in this study for verbs, in the processing of time and temporal structure [10]. While Shapiro et al. [3] are admirably restrained in their interpretations, they outline how their results suggest there is some relationship between grammatical class and semantic representations. This is a far from trivial issue: from a classic psycho-linguistic perspective, semantic and syntactic representations can be fully dissociated and indeed, from some positions, syntactic representations could well be considered to be preeminent in human language organization. The new data suggest, at the very least, that these hard distinctions need to be softened when we consider the neural instantiation of these linguistic categories. Such a perspective has also been addressed in a recent study with which I was associated [11]. Here we moved from English as our model language and exploited the fact that Italian distinguishes between nouns and verbs morphologically — for example, 'fermata', stop (noun) and 'fermare', to stop (verb) — even when the words are not inflected as plurals or by tense. We controlled for semantic effects by using only verbs and nouns that referred to events, and we directly compared the contribution of grammatical class (nouns and verbs) to the contribution of semantic class (whether the words referred to motion or sensations). Our study involved native Italian speakers listening passively to single words. We found that the same brain network was activated in processing nouns and verbs, whereas differences were reported for the processing of motion, which showed preferential activation in left primary and premotor cortex, and sensory, which showed preferential activation in left inferior fusiform gyrus. Thus, differences in preferential activation in our study [11] were strictly driven by semantic rather than grammatical class. Following on from the new study by Shapiro et al. [3], this is also evidence suggesting that noun/verb processing differences are not related to grammatical class per se, but are driven by correlated semantic differences (see also [4]). Of course, to some degree we find somewhat different effects since our paradigm (speech perception), or baseline (an acoustic control) and our stimuli are different, but I think the converging interpretations of a semantic component to syntactic classes raises some intriguing issues. Will we ever be able to identify neural systems which show a purely syntactic profile of processing, and if so, will nouns and verbs be the way to do so unambiguously? Is syntactic structure the dominant organizational principle …