The hypothesized role of Broca's area in sentence processing ranges from domain-general executive function to domain-specific computation that is specific to certain syntactic structures. We examined this issue by manipulating syntactic structure and conflict between syntactic and semantic cues in a sentence processing task. Functional…

Recent ERP studies report that implausible verb-argument combinations can elicit a centro-parietal P600 effect (e.g., "The hearty meal was devouring..."; Kim & Osterhout, 2005). Such eliciting conditions do not involve outright syntactic anomaly, deviating from previous reports of P600. Kim and Osterhout (2005) attributed such P600 effects to…

Text cues facilitate the perception of spoken sentences to which they are semantically related (Zekveld, Rudner, et al., 2011). In this study, semantically related and unrelated cues preceding sentences evoked more activation in middle temporal gyrus (MTG) and inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) than nonword cues, regardless of acoustic quality (speech…

What helps us determine whether a word is a noun or a verb, without conscious awareness? We report on cues in the way individual English words are spelled, and, for the first time, identify their neural correlates via functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We used a lexical decision task with trisyllabic nouns and verbs containing…

Priming effects were examined in 40 children (9-15 years old) using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). An orthographic judgment task required participants to determine if two sequentially presented spoken words had the same spelling for the rime. Four lexical conditions were designed: similar orthography and phonology (O[superscript…

A central issue in cognitive neuroscience today concerns how distributed neural networks in the brain that are used in language learning and processing can be involved in non-linguistic cognitive sequence learning. This issue is informed by a wealth of functional neurophysiology studies of sentence comprehension, along with a number of recent…

The electrophysiological response to words during the "N400" time window (approximately 300-500 ms post-onset) is affected by the context in which the word is presented, but whether this effect reflects the impact of context on "access" of the stored lexical information itself or, alternatively, post-access "integration" processes is still an open…

The brain activity associated with automatic semantic priming has been extensively studied. Thus far there has been no prior study that directly contrasts the neural mechanisms of semantic and affective priming. The present study employed event-related fMRI to examine the common and distinct neural bases underlying conceptual and affective priming…

One explanation for the inconsistencies in research examining the sentence comprehension abilities of the right hemisphere (RH) is the presence of confounding variables that have generally served to disadvantage the processing capacities of the RH. As such, the present study aimed to investigate hemispheric differences in the use of message-level…

It has recently been shown that interhemispheric communication is needed for the processing of foveally presented words. In this study, we examine whether the integration of information happens at an early stage, before word recognition proper starts, or whether the integration is part of the recognition process itself. Two lexical decision…

Masked priming is used in psycholinguistic studies to assess questions about lexical access and representation. We present two masked priming experiments using MEG. If the MEG signal elicited by words reflects specific aspects of lexical retrieval, then one expects to identify specific neural correlates of retrieval that are sensitive to priming.…

In an event-related potentials (ERPs) study, we examined the comprehension of different types of Chinese (Mandarin) relative clauses (object vs. subject-extracted) to test the universality and language specificity of sentence comprehension processes. Because Chinese lacks morphosyntactic cues to sentence constituent relations, it allows a test of…

During sentence comprehension, older adults are less likely than younger adults to predict features of likely upcoming words. A pair of experiments assessed whether such differences would extend to tasks with reduced working memory demands and time pressures. In Experiment 1, event-related brain potentials were measured as younger and older adults…

Readers acquire information outside the current eye fixation. Previous research indicates that having only the fixated word available slows reading, but when the next word is visible, reading is almost as fast as when the whole line is seen. Parafoveal-on-foveal effects are interpreted to reflect that the characteristics of a parafoveal word can…

Despite the increasing number of neuroimaging studies of syntactic gender processing no model is currently available that includes data from visual and auditory language comprehension and language production. This paper provides a systematic review of the neural correlates of syntactic gender processing. Based on anatomical information from…