Recent evidence suggests that blindness enables visual circuits to contribute to language processing. We examined whether this dramatic functional plasticity has a sensitive period. BOLD fMRI signal was measured in congenitally blind, late blind (blindness onset 9-years-old or later) and sighted participants while they performed a sentence…

We assessed the relationship between brain structure and function in 10 individuals with specific language impairment (SLI), compared to six unaffected siblings, and 16 unrelated control participants with typical language. Voxel-based morphometry indicated that grey matter in the SLI group, relative to controls, was increased in the left inferior…

Verb production in sentences was investigated in two groups of late bilingual Greek-English speakers: individuals with anomic aphasia and a control group. Verb retrieval in sentences was significantly impaired in both languages for the individuals with anomic aphasia. Additional results revealed no effect of instrumentality on action naming in…

In order to explore the impact of a degraded semantic system on the structure of language production, we analysed transcripts from autobiographical memory interviews to identify naturally-occurring speech errors by eight patients with semantic dementia (SD) and eight age-matched normal speakers. Relative to controls, patients were significantly…

Idiom comprehension in 15 aphasic patients was assessed with three tasks: a sentence-to-picture matching task, a sentence-to-word matching task and an oral definition task. The results of all three tasks showed that the idiom comprehension in aphasic patients was impaired compared to that of the control group, and was significantly affected by the…

Apraxia of Speech (AOS) is an impairment of motor programming. However, the exact nature of this deficit remains unclear. The present study examined motor programming in AOS in the context of a recent two-stage model [Klapp, S. T. (1995). Motor response programming during simple and choice reaction time: The role of practice. "Journal of…

Individuals with developmental dyslexia are often impaired in their ability to process certain linguistic and even basic non-linguistic auditory signals. Recent investigations report conflicting findings regarding impaired low-level binaural detection mechanisms associated with dyslexia. Binaural impairment has been hypothesized to stem from a…

Clinical and imaging studies suggest that the cerebellum is involved in language tasks, but the extent to which slowed language production in cerebellar patients contributes to their poor performance on these tasks is not clear. We explored this relationship in 18 patients with cerebellar degeneration and 16 healthy controls who completed measures…

This paper explores how the test-retest reliability is modulated by different groups of participants and experimental tasks. A group of 12 healthy participants and a group of nine stroke patients performed the same language imaging experiment twice, test and retest, on different days. The experiment consists of four conditions, one audio condition…

It has been hypothesized that nouns and verbs are processed within relatively separable semantic memory networks. Although abnormal semantic processing is a common feature of schizophrenia-spectrum disorders, no prior studies have specifically examined the comparability of noun and verb generation deficits in schizophrenia. In the current study,…

This study used the event-related brain potential mismatch negativity (MMN) to investigate preconscious discrimination of harmonically rich tones (differing in duration) and consonant-vowel syllables (differing in the initial consonant) in aphasia. Eighteen Norwegian aphasic patients, examined on average 3 months after brain injury, were compared…

Sentences with non-canonical wh- movement are often difficult for individuals with agrammatic Broca's aphasia to understand (Carramazza & Zurif, 1976, inter alia). However, the explanation of this difficulty remains controversial, and little is known about how individuals with aphasia try to understand such sentences in real time. This study uses…

We tested categorical perception and speech-in-noise perception in a group of five-year-old preschool children genetically at risk for dyslexia, compared to a group of well-matched control children and a group of adults. Both groups of children differed significantly from the adults on all speech measures. Comparing both child groups, the risk…

At 3 years of age the spontaneous language of 17 typically developing children was compared to two groups of toddlers who were at risk for language delay for very different reasons. One at-risk group, late talkers, appeared normal in all respects except for their delayed language. These 20 children scored at or below the fifteenth percentile for…