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…

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…

The present study aimed to uncover the neural activity associated with specific in-group and out-group word related stimuli, to examine the neuroanatomical basis of group membership concept representation, and investigate to what extent neural processes represent "in-group" differently from "out-group". Participants' brain activity was measured…

Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) perform worse than controls when listening to speech in a temporally modulated noise (Alcantara, Weisblatt, Moore, & Bolton, 2004; Groen et al., 2009). The current study examined whether this is due to poor auditory temporal-envelope processing. Temporal modulation transfer functions were measured in…

Current research on analogy processing assumes that different conceptual relations are treated similarly. However, just as words and concepts are related in distinct ways, different kinds of analogies may employ distinct types of relationships. An important distinction in how words are related is the difference between associative (dog-bone) and…

Pronouns are extraordinarily common in daily language yet little is known about the neural mechanisms that support decisions about pronoun reference. We propose a large-scale neural network for resolving pronoun reference that consists of two components. First, a core language network in peri-Sylvian cortex supports syntactic and semantic…

In a noisy environment, visual perception of articulatory movements improves natural speech intelligibility. Parallel to phonemic processing based on auditory signal, visemic processing constitutes a counterpart based on "visemes", the distinctive visual units of speech. Aiming at investigating the neural substrates of visemic processing in a…

A quantitative, coordinate-based meta-analysis combined data from 354 participants across 22 fMRI studies and one positron emission tomography (PET) study to identify the differences in neural correlates of figurative and literal language processing, and to investigate the role of the right hemisphere (RH) in figurative language processing.…

We used structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and voxel based morphometry (VBM) to investigate whether the efficiency of word processing in the non-native language (lexical efficiency) and the number of non-native languages spoken (2+ versus 1) were related to local differences in the brain structure of bilingual and multilingual speakers.…

In individuals with ASD, difficulties with language comprehension are most evident when higher-level semantic-pragmatic language processing is required, for instance when context has to be used to interpret the meaning of an utterance. Until now, it is unclear at what level of processing and for what type of context these difficulties in language…

It has been hypothesized that cerebral lateralization of function enhances cognitive performance. Evidence was found in birds and fish. However, recent research in humans did not support this hypothesis. We aimed to replicate and extend these findings for single- and dual-task performance in an ecologically relevant task. We combined a word…

The present study contrasted the neural correlates of encoding item-context associations according to whether the contextual information was visual or auditory. Subjects (N = 20) underwent fMRI scanning while studying a series of visually presented pictures, each of which co-occurred with either a visually or an auditorily presented name. The task…

Event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (ER-fMRI) was adopted to examine brain activation of syntactic processing in reading logographic Chinese. While fMRI data were obtained, 15 readers of Chinese read individually presented sentences and performed semantic congruency judgments on three kinds of sentences: Congruous sentences (CON),…

The role of sub-cortical structures such as the striatum in language remains a controversial issue. Based on linguistic claims that language processing implies both recovery of lexical information and application of combinatorial rules it has been shown that striatal damaged patients have difficulties applying conjugation rules while lexical…

Verbal and visuospatial abilities are typically subserved by different cerebral hemispheres: the left hemisphere for the former and the right hemisphere for the latter. However little is known of the origin of this division of function. Causal theories propose that functional asymmetry is an obligatory pattern of organisation, while statistical…