Models of how the human brain reconstructs an intended meaning from a linguistic input often draw upon the N400 event-related potential (ERP) component as evidence. Current accounts of the N400 emphasise either the role of contextually induced lexical preactivation of a critical word (Lau, Phillips, & Poeppel, 2008) or the ease of integration into…

The purpose of this study was to examine whether the N400 is affected by the semantic richness of associated neighboring word members or by the density of the orthographic syllable neighborhood. Another purpose of this study was to investigate the source of the different LPC in respect to the semantic richness. To do so, the density of the…

Reading compound words was studied in neglect dyslexia in order to assess the influence of "headedness". The "head" of a compound is the component that determines the grammatical category, the syntactic (e.g., the gender) and the semantic properties of the compound as a whole. For example, in the word "blackberry" "berry" is the compound's head.…

Work in theoretical linguistics and psycholinguistics suggests that human linguistic knowledge forms a continuum between individual lexical items and abstract syntactic representations, with most linguistic representations falling between the two extremes and taking the form of lexical items stored together with the syntactic/semantic contexts in…

Several empirical lines of investigation support the idea that syllable-sized units may be involved in visual word recognition processes. In this perspective, the present study aimed at investigating further the nature of the process that causes syllabic effects in reading. To do so, the syllable frequency effect was investigated in French using…

While natural speech does not possess the same degree of temporal regularity found in music, there is recent evidence to suggest that temporal regularity enhances speech processing. The aim of this experiment was to examine whether speech processing would be enhanced by the prior presentation of a rhythmical prime. We recorded electrophysiological…

Whereas most previous studies on emotion in language have focussed on single words, we investigated the influence of the emotional valence of a word on the syntactic and semantic processes unfolding during sentence comprehension, by means of event-related brain potentials (ERP). Experiment 1 assessed how positive, negative, and neutral adjectives…

Efficient reading relies on expertise in the visual word form area, with abnormalities in the functional specialization of this area observed in individuals with developmental dyslexia. We have investigated event related potentials in print tuning in adults with dyslexia, based on their N170 response at 135-255 ms. Control and dyslexic adults…

Both taxonomic and thematic semantic relations have been studied extensively in behavioral studies and there is an emerging consensus that the anterior temporal lobe plays a particularly important role in the representation and processing of taxonomic relations, but the neural basis of thematic semantics is less clear. We used eye tracking to…

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…

Approximately half the world's population can now speak more than one language. Understanding the neural basis of language organisation in bilinguals, and whether the cortical networks involved during language processing differ from that of monolinguals, is therefore an important area of research. A main issue concerns whether L2 (second language)…

Previous research indicates that, under explicit instructions to listen to spoken stimuli or in speech-oriented behavioural tasks, the brain's responses to senseless pseudowords are larger than those to meaningful words; the reverse is true in non-attended conditions. These differential responses could be used as a tool to trace linguistic…

In this study, the first to explore the cortical correlates of signed language (SL) processing under point-light display conditions, the observer identified either a signer or a lexical sign from a display in which different signers were seen producing a number of different individual signs. Many of the regions activated by point-light under these…

A contentious issue in memory research is whether verbal short-term memory (STM) depends on a neural system specifically dedicated to the temporary maintenance of information, or instead relies on the same brain areas subserving the comprehension and production of language. In this study, we examined a large sample of adults with acquired brain…

Empirically derived semantic feature norms categorized into different types of knowledge (e.g., visual, functional, auditory) can be summed to create number-of-feature counts per knowledge type. Initial evidence suggests several such knowledge types may be recruited during language comprehension. The present study provides a more detailed…