Footnotes

1Dual memberships can occur not only between nouns and verbs but also between other grammatical classes in Chinese (see Hu, 1996).

2The only study that has looked that the class-ambiguous words we are aware of is Federmeier et al. (2000), in an ERP study of lexical categories in sentence context, as reviewed above.

3The higher frequency for the ambiguous set might be simply because ambiguous words can occur in both the noun contexts and the verb contexts.

4One cannot easily use the current study to support the linguistic argument that Chinese words have no grammatical class memberships.  Although nouns and verbs in Chinese display significan flexibility in grammatical functions, they may still differ in other important dimensions such as semantics and lexical co-occurrence distributions (Guo, 2001; Li, 2002).  Thus, we cannot easily jump from the non-distinct cortical responses to the nonexistence of nouns and verbs in Chinese.