A growing body of literature investigating the neural correlates of emotion word processing has emerged in recent years. Written words have been shown to represent a suitable means to study emotion processing and most importantly to address the distinct and interactive contributions of the two dimensions of emotion: valence and arousal. The aim of…

In this paper we examine the neurobiological correlates of syntax, the processing of structured sequences, by comparing FMRI results on artificial and natural language syntax. We discuss these and similar findings in the context of formal language and computability theory. We used a simple right-linear unification grammar in an implicit artificial…

An event-related potential experiment was conducted to investigate the temporal neural dynamics of animacy processing in the interpretation of classifier-noun combinations. Participants read sentences that had a non-canonical structure, "object noun" + "subject noun" + "verb" + "numeral-classifier" + "adjective". The object noun and its classifier…

Some situations require one to quickly stop an initiated response. Recent evidence suggests that rapid stopping engages a mechanism that has diffuse effects on the motor system. For example, stopping the hand dampens the excitability of the task-irrelevant leg. However, it is unclear whether this "global suppression" could apply across wider motor…

Conceptual metaphor theory suggests that knowledge is structured around metaphorical mappings derived from physical experience. Segregated processing of object properties in sensory cortex allows testing of the hypothesis that metaphor processing recruits activity in domain-specific sensory cortex. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging…

One of the most challenging tasks in neuroscience in language studies, is investigation of the brain's ability to integrate and process information. This task can only be successfully addressed by applying various assessment techniques integrated into a multimodal approach. Each of these techniques has its advantages and disadvantages, but help to…

Textbooks dealing with the anatomical representation of language in the human brain display two language-related zones, Broca's area and Wernicke's area, connected by a single dorsal fiber tract, the arcuate fascicle. This classical model is incomplete. Modern imaging techniques have identified a second long association tract between the temporal…

Conversation is multi-modal, involving both talk and gesture. Does understanding depictive gestures engage processes similar to those recruited in the comprehension of drawings or photographs? Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded from neurotypical adults as they viewed spontaneously produced depictive gestures preceded by congruent…

Metonymies are exemplary models for complex semantic association processes at the sentence level. We investigated processing of metonymies using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). During an 1.5 Tesla fMRI scan, 14 healthy subjects (12 female) read 124 short German sentences with either literal (like "Africa is arid"),…

Pitch processing is lateralized to the right hemisphere; linguistic pitch is further mediated by left cortical areas. This experiment investigates whether ear asymmetries vary in brainstem representation of pitch depending on linguistic status. Brainstem frequency-following responses (FFRs) were elicited by monaural stimulation of the left and…

The left inferior frontal cortex, the caudate and the anterior cingulate have been proposed as the neural origin of language switching, but most of the studies were conducted in low proficient bilinguals. In the present study, we investigated brain areas involved in language switching in a sample of 19 early, high-proficient Spanish-Catalan…

Previous repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation and neuroimaging studies showed that Broca's area is involved in the interaction between gestures and words. However, in these studies the nature of this interaction was not fully investigated; consequently, we addressed this issue in three behavioral experiments. When compared to the…

The widely known discovery of mirror neurons in macaques shows that premotor and parietal cortical areas are not only involved in executing one's own movement, but are also active when observing the action of others. The goal of this essay is to critically evaluate the substance of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission…

Empirical evidence demonstrating that sentence meaning is rapidly reconciled with the visual environment has been broadly construed as supporting the seamless interaction of visual and linguistic representations during situated comprehension. Based on recent behavioral and neuroscientific findings, however, we argue for the more deeply rooted…

Electrophysiological techniques were used to assess the generalizability of concreteness effects on word processing across word class (nouns and verbs) and different types of lexical ambiguity (syntactic only and combined syntactic/semantic). The results replicated prior work in showing an enhanced N400 response and a sustained frontal negativity…