Neuroscience has greatly improved our understanding of the brain basis of abstract lexical and semantic processes. The neuronal devices underlying words and concepts are distributed neuronal assemblies reaching into sensory and motor systems of the cortex and, at the cognitive level, information binding in such widely dispersed circuits is…

How long does it take the human mind to grasp the idea when hearing or reading a sentence? Neurophysiological methods looking directly at the time course of brain activity indexes of comprehension are critical for finding the answer to this question. As the dominant cognitive approaches, models of serial/cascaded and parallel processing, make…

We develop the view that the involvement of mirror neurons in embodied experience grounds brain structures that underlie language, but that many other brain regions are involved. We stress the cooperation between the dorsal and ventral streams in praxis and language. Both have perceptual and motor schemas but the perceptual schemas in the dorsal…

The embodied cognition approach to the study of the mind proposes that higher order mental processes such as concept formation and language are essentially based on perceptual and motor processes. Contrary to the classical approach in cognitive science, in which concepts are viewed as amodal, arbitrary symbols, embodied semantics argues that…

In 1906, Pierre Marie triggered a heated controversy and an exchange of articles with Jules Dejerine over the localization of language functions in the human brain. The debate spread internationally. One of the timeliest responses, that appeared in print 1 month after Marie's paper, came from Christofredo Jakob, a Bavarian-born neuropathologist…

Well-regulated blood flow within the brain is vital to normal function. The brain's requirement for sufficient blood flow is ensured by a tight link between neural activity and blood flow. The link between regional synaptic activity and regional cerebral blood flow, termed functional hyperemia, is the basis for several modern imaging techniques…

Activation studies in patients with aphasia due to stroke or tumours in the dominant hemisphere have revealed effects of disinhibition in ipsilateral perilesional and in contralateral homotopic cortical regions, referred to as collateral and transcallosal disinhibition. These findings were supported by studies with selective disturbance of…

This paper provides a brief review of various uses of magnetic resonance perfusion imaging in the investigation of brain/language relationships. The reviewed studies illustrate how perfusion imaging can reveal areas of brain where dysfunction due to low blood flow is associated with specific language deficits, and where restoration of blood flow…

Co-speech gestures embody a form of manual action that is tightly coupled to the language system. As such, the co-occurrence of speech and co-speech gestures is an excellent example of the interplay between language and action. There are, however, other ways in which language and action can be thought of as closely related. In this paper we will…

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants read and made acceptability judgments about sentences containing three types of adjective sequences: (1) normal sequences--e.g., "Jennifer rode a huge gray elephant"; (2) reversed sequences that violate grammatical-semantic constraints on linear order--e.g., *"Jennifer rode a…

Mirror neurons, first described in the rostral part of monkey ventral premotor cortex (area F5), discharge both when the animal performs a goal-directed hand action and when it observes another individual performing the same or a similar action. More recently, in the same area mirror neurons responding to the observation of mouth actions have been…

Bilateral vascular thalamic lesions are rare. Although a variety of neurobehavioral manifestations have been described, the literature is less documented with regard to accompanying linguistic disturbances. This article presents an in-depth neurolinguistic analysis of the language symptoms of a patient who incurred bilateral paramedian ischemic…

A quantitative method is introduced for detecting and correcting artifactual signal changes in BOLD time series data arising from the magnetic field warping caused by motion of the articulatory apparatus when speaking aloud, with extensions to detection of subvocal articulatory activity during silent reading. Whole-head images allow the large,…

The paper presents a computational model of language in which linguistic abilities evolve in organisms that interact with an environment. Each individual's behavior is controlled by a neural network and we study the consequences in the network's internal functional organization of learning to process different classes of words. Agents are selected…

The right and left visual fields each project to the contralateral cerebral hemispheres, but the extent of the functional overlap of the two hemifields along the vertical meridian is still under debate. After presenting the spatial, temporal, and functional specifications of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), we show that TMS is particularly…