A primary focus within neuroimaging research on language comprehension is on the distribution of semantic knowledge in the brain. Studies have shown that the left posterior middle temporal gyrus (LPMT), a region just anterior to area MT/V5, is important for the processing of complex action knowledge. It has also been found that motion verbs cause…

We investigated whether and when information conveyed by spoken language impacts on the processing of visually presented objects. In contrast to traditional views, grounded-cognition posits direct links between language comprehension and perceptual processing. We used a magnetoencephalographic cross-modal priming paradigm to disentangle these…

When listening to speech in everyday-life situations, our cognitive system must often cope with signal instabilities such as sudden breaks, mispronunciations, interfering noises or reverberations potentially causing disruptions at the acoustic/phonetic interface and preventing efficient lexical access and semantic integration. The physiological…

Nine early non-demented bilingual (L1--Friulian, L2--Italian) patients with Parkinson's disease and nine normal controls matched for age, sex and years of education were studied on a spontaneous language production task. All subjects had acquired L1 from birth in a home environment and L2 at the age of six at school formally. Patients with PD…

Previous research indicates severe disabilities in processing figurative language in people diagnosed on the autism spectrum disorders. However, this aspect of language comprehension in Asperger syndrome (AS) specifically has rarely been the subject of formal study. The present study aimed to examine the possibility that in addition to their…

fMR-Adaptation, where a pair of identical stimuli elicits a smaller neural response than a pair of dissimilar stimuli has been extensively used to study object identification and classification as well as memory. Thus far this technique has found limited application in evaluating brain areas sensitive to meaning, language and control of language…

Effective literacy education in deaf students calls for psycholinguistic research revealing the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying their written language processing. When learning a written language, deaf students are often instructed to sign out printed text. The present fMRI study was intended to reveal the neural substrates associated…

There is a considerable linguistic debate on whether phrasal verbs (e.g., "turn up," "break down") are processed as two separate words connected by a syntactic rule or whether they form a single lexical unit. Moreover, views differ on whether meaning (transparency vs. opacity) plays a role in determining their syntactically-connected or lexical…

Understanding how language emerged in our species calls for a detailed investigation of the initial specialization of the human brain for speech processing. Our earlier research demonstrated that an adult-like left-lateralized network of perisylvian areas is already active when infants listen to sentences in their native language, but did not…

Language is proposed to have developed atop the human analog of the macaque mirror neuron system for action perception and production [Arbib M.A. 2005. From monkey-like action recognition to human language: An evolutionary framework for neurolinguistics (with commentaries and author's response). "Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 28", 105-167; Arbib…

In two experiments using the action-sentence-compatibility paradigm we investigated the simulation processes that readers undertake when processing state descriptions with adjectives (e.g., "Die Schublade ist offen/zu". ["The drawer is open/shut"]) or adjectival passives (e.g., "Die Schublade ist…

We investigated how auditory language processing is modified by a listener's previous experience with the specific activities mentioned in the speech. In particular, we asked whether neural responses related to language processing depend on one's experience with the action-based content of this language. Ice-hockey players and novices passively…

Using event-related potentials (ERPs), we investigated the N400 (an ERP component that occurs in response to meaningful stimuli) in children aged 8-10 years old and examined relationships between the N400 and individual differences in listening comprehension, word recognition and non-word decoding. Moreover, we tested the claim that the N400…

Previous literature in alphabetic languages suggests that the occipital-temporal region (the ventral pathway) is specialized for automatic parallel word recognition, whereas the parietal region (the dorsal pathway) is specialized for serial letter-by-letter reading (and). However, few studies have directly examined the role of the ventral and…

The main goal of this study was to determine whether the phonological and semantic processing of words are similarly influenced by an increase in processing complexity. Thirty-six French-speaking young adults performed both semantic and phonological word judgment tasks, using a divided visual field procedure. The phonological complexity of words…