In this study we investigated whether objects and their name evoke the activation of the same motor programs. In the first experiment participants had to make speeded responses based on the category of an object. They had to signal whether an object, presented visually, either within or outside their reachable space, was natural or manufactured,…

Humans have special abilities in processing hierarchical, recursive structures. Here we investigated how an upcoming word embedded in a hierarchical structure is semantically integrated into the prior representation during sentence comprehension. Participants read Chinese sentences with a complex verb argument structure "subject…

An impairment for verbs has been described in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD), suggesting that a disruption of frontal-subcortical circuits may result in dysfunction of the neural systems involved in action-verb processing. A previous study suggested that deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) during verb generation…

While increasing evidence points to a critical role for the motor system in language processing, the focus of previous work has been on the linguistic category of verbs. Here we tested whether nouns are effective in modulating the motor system and further whether different kinds of nouns--those referring to artifacts or natural items, and items…

It is not clear how compound words are represented within the influential framework of the lemma-lexeme theory. Theoretically, compounds could be structured through a multiple lemma architecture, in which the lemma nodes of both the compound and its constituents are involved in lexical processing. If this were the case, syntactic properties of…

During sentence processing there is a preference to treat the first noun phrase found as the subject and agent, unless marked the other way. This preference would lead to a conflict in thematic role assignment when the syntactic structure conforms to a non-canonical object-before-subject pattern. Left perisylvian and fronto-parietal brain networks…

Emotional meaning impacts word processing. However, it is unclear, at which functional locus this influence occurs and whether and how it depends on word class. These questions were addressed by recording event-related potentials (ERPs) in a lexical decision task with written adjectives, verbs, and nouns of positive, negative, and neutral…

An event-related potential (ERP) study was conducted to investigate the temporal neural dynamics of semantic integration processes at different levels of syntactic hierarchy during Chinese sentence reading. In a hierarchical structure, "subject noun" + "verb" + "numeral" + "classifier" + "object noun," the object noun is constrained by selectional…

We report the case of an English-speaking aphasic patient (JP) with left posterior-frontal damage affecting the inferior frontal and precentral gyri. In speaking, JP was impaired with the regular inflections of nouns and pseudonouns, making errors like "pears" instead of "pear" or "door" for "doors", while the spoken production of noun stems and…

The present study investigated the time-course of semantic integration in auditory compound word processing. Compounding is a productive mechanism of word formation that is used frequently in many languages. Specifically, we examined whether semantic integration is incremental or is delayed until the head, the last constituent in German, is…

This study contrasted two approaches to word meaning: the statistically determined role of high-contribution features like "striped" in the meaning of complex nouns like "tiger" typically used in studies of semantic memory, and the contribution of diagnostic features like "parent's brother" that play a critical role in the meaning of nominal kinds…

The neuropsychological features of the primary progressive aphasia (PPA) syndromes continue to be defined. Here we describe a detailed neuropsychological case study of a patient with a mutation in the progranulin ("GRN") gene who presented with progressive word-finding difficulty. Key neuropsychological features in this case included gravely…

We investigated the differential role of two frontal regions in the processing of grammatical and semantic knowledge. Given the documented specificity of the prefrontal cortex for the grammatical class of verbs, and of the primary motor cortex for the semantic class of action words, we sought to investigate whether the prefrontal cortex is also…

In the neuropsychological literature, there is converging evidence for a dominant role of the left hemisphere in morphological processing. However, two right hemisphere patients were described with a clear dissociation between impaired derivational morphology and preserved inflectional processing. A recent fMRI experiment confirmed the involvement…

People with phonologic alexia often have difficulty reading functors and verbs, in addition to pseudowords. Friedman et al. [Friedman, R. B., Sample, D. M, & Lott, S. N. (2002). The role of level of representation in the use of paired associate learning for rehabilitation of alexia. "Neuropsychologia, 40", 223-234] reported a successful treatment…