This paper reports a conjunction analysis between semantic relatedness judgment and semantic associate generation of Chinese nouns and verbs with concrete or abstract meanings. The results revealed a verb-specific task-independent region in LpSTG&MTG, and task-dependent activation in a left frontal region in semantic judgment and the left SMG in…

Discourse cohesion and coherence give communication its continuity providing the grammatical and lexical links that hold an utterance or text together and give it meaning. Researchers often link cohesion and coherence deficits to the frontal lobes by drawing attention to frontal lobe dysfunction in populations where discourse cohesion and…

Previous studies suggest that whereas the left hemisphere (LH) is involved in fine semantic processing, the right hemisphere (RH) is uniquely engaged in coarse semantic coding including the comprehension of distinct types of language such as figurative language, lexical ambiguity and verbal humor (e.g., and ). The present study examined the…

Upon stimulation, real time maps of cortical hemodynamic responses can be obtained by non-invasive functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) which measures changes in oxygenated and deoxygenated hemoglobin after positioning multiple sources and detectors over the human scalp. The current commercially available transportable fNIRS systems have…

This study explores oscillatory brain activity by means of event-related synchronization and desynchronization (%ERS/ERD) of EEG activity during the use of phonological and orthographic-morphological spelling strategies in L2 (English) and L1 (German) in native German speaking children. EEG was recorded while 33 children worked on a task requiring…

This article addresses issues in embodied sentence processing from a "cognitive neural systems" approach that combines analysis of the behavior in question, analysis of the known neurophysiological bases of this behavior, and the synthesis of a neuro-computational model of embodied sentence processing that can be applied to and tested in the…

Recent research suggests that there is a processing distinction between consonants and vowels in visual-word recognition. Here we conjointly examine the time course of consonants and vowels in processes of letter identity and letter position assignment. Event related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants read words and pseudowords in…

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…

Modality-specific models of conceptual memory propose close links between concepts and the sensory-motor systems. Neuroimaging studies found, in different subject groups, that action-related and sound-related concepts activated different parts of posterior middle temporal gyrus (pMTG), suggesting a modality-specific representation of conceptual…

Models of speaking distinguish producing meaning, words and syntax as three different linguistic components of speaking. Nevertheless, little is known about the brain's integrated neuronal infrastructure for speech production. We investigated semantic, lexical and syntactic aspects of speaking using fMRI. In a picture description task, we…

Mechanisms of cortical reorganization underlying the enhancement of speech processing have been poorly investigated. In the present study, we addressed changes in functional and effective connectivity induced in subjects who learned to deliberately increase activation in the right inferior frontal gyrus (rIFG), and improved their ability to…

The human temporal lobe is well known to be critical for language comprehension. Previous physiological research has focused mainly on non-invasive neuroimaging and electrophysiological techniques with each approach requiring averaging across many trials and subjects. The results of these studies have implicated extended anatomical regions in…

Electrophysiological studies investigating similarities between music and language perception have relied exclusively on the signal averaging technique, which does not adequately represent oscillatory aspects of electrical brain activity that are relevant for higher cognition. The current study investigated the patterns of brain oscillations…

We employ a linear mixed-effects model to estimate the effects of visual form and the linguistic properties of Chinese characters on M100 and M170 MEG responses from single-trial data of Chinese and English speakers in a Chinese lexical decision task. Cortically constrained minimum-norm estimation is used to compute the activation of M100 and M170…

Our aim was to investigate whether developing language system, as measured by a priming task for spoken words, is organized by semantic categories. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded during a priming task for spoken words in 18- and 24-month-old monolingual French learning children. Spoken word pairs were either semantically related…