Before performing neurosurgery, an exhaustive presurgical assessment is required, usually including an investigation of language cerebral lateralization. Among the available procedures, the intracarotid amobarbital test (IAT) was formerly the most widely used. However, this procedure has many limitations: it is invasive and potentially traumatic,…

The neural bases of prosody during the production of literal and idiomatic interpretations of literally plausible idioms was investigated. Left- and right-hemisphere-damaged participants and normal controls produced literal and idiomatic versions of idioms ("He hit the books.") All groups modulated duration to distinguish the interpretations. LHD…

Previous studies with brain-injured patients have suggested that language abilities are necessary for complex problem-solving, even when tasks are non-verbal. In the current study, we tested this notion by analyzing behavioral and neuroimaging data from a large group of left-hemisphere stroke patients (n = 107) suffering from a range of language…

Five nonfluent aphasia patients participated in a picture-naming treatment that used an intention manipulation (opening a box and pressing a button on a device in the box with the left hand) to initiate naming trials and was designed to re-lateralize word production mechanisms from the left to the right frontal lobe. To test the underlying…

The Wada test is at present the method of choice for preoperative assessment of patients who require surgery close to cortical language areas. It is, however, an invasive test with an attached morbidity risk. By now, an alternative to the Wada test is to combine a lexical word generation paradigm with non-invasive imaging techniques. However,…