The present study examined how contextual learning and in particular emotionality conditioning impacts the neural processing of words, as possible key factors for the acquisition of words' emotional connotation. 21 participants learned on five consecutive days associations between meaningless pseudowords and unpleasant or neutral pictures using an…

The role of attentional control in lexical ambiguity resolution was examined in two patients with damage to the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) and one control patient with non-LIFG damage. Experiment 1 confirmed that the LIFG patients had attentional control deficits compared to normal controls while the non-LIFG patient was relatively…

There exists an increasing body of research demonstrating that language processing is aided by context-based predictions. Recent findings suggest that the brain generates estimates about the likely physical appearance of upcoming words based on syntactic predictions: words that do not physically look like the expected syntactic category show…

The electrophysiological response to words during the "N400" time window (approximately 300-500 ms post-onset) is affected by the context in which the word is presented, but whether this effect reflects the impact of context on "access" of the stored lexical information itself or, alternatively, post-access "integration" processes is still an open…

The problem of recognizing phonological variations in the speech input has triggered numerous treatments in speech processing models. Two areas of current controversy are the possibility of phonological underspecification in the mental lexicon and the nature of the mapping mechanism from the speech signal to the abstract lexical entry. We present…