Mirror writing occurs in healthy children, in various pathologies and occasionally in healthy adults. There are only scant experimental data on the underlying brain processes. Eight, right-handed, healthy young adults were scanned (BOLD-fMRI) before and after practicing left-hand mirror-writing (lh-MW) over seven sessions. They wrote dictated…

We report a patient showing isolated phonological agraphia after an ischemic stroke involving the left supramarginal gyrus (SMG). In this patient, we investigated the effects of focal repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) given as theta burst stimulation (TBS) over the left SMG, corresponding to the Brodmann area (BA) 40. The patient…

Using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), motor evoked potentials (MEPs) were recorded from two antagonistic muscles, the first dorsal interosseus (FDI) of the hand and the extensor communis digitorum (EC) of the forearm. FDI is involved in grasping actions and EC in releasing. TMS pulses were delivered while participants were reading…

We investigated the neural basis of lexical access to written stimuli in adult dyslexics and normal readers via the Lexicality effect (pseudowords greater than words) and the Frequency effect (low greater than high frequent words). The participants read aloud German words (with low or high lexical frequency) or pseudowords while being scanned. In…

Relative to abstract words, concrete words typically elicit faster response times and larger N400 and N700 event-related potential (ERP) brain responses. These effects have been interpreted as reflecting the denser links to associated semantic information of concrete words and their recruitment of visual imagery processes. Here, we examined…

Neurobiology of reading research has yet to explore whether reliance on the ventral-lexical stream during word reading can be enhanced by the instructed reading strategy, or whether it is impervious to such strategies. We examined Instructions: "name all" vs. "name words" (based on spelling), Word Type: "regular words" vs. "exception words", and…

This functional MRI study investigated the involvement of the left inferior parietal cortex (IPC) in spoken language production (Speech). Its role has been apparent in some studies but not others, and is not convincingly supported by clinical studies as they rarely include cases with lesions confined to the parietal lobe. We compared Speech with…

This study investigates the ERP components associated with the processing of words that are critical to generating and rejecting deductive conditional Modus Ponens arguments ("If P then Q; P//"Therefore, "Q"). The generation of a logical inference is investigated by placing a verb in the minor premise that matches the one used in the antecedent of…

Circuitry in ventral occipital-temporal cortex is essential for seeing words. We analyze the circuitry within a specific ventral-occipital region, the visual word form area (VWFA). The VWFA is immediately adjacent to the retinotopically organized VO-1 and VO-2 visual field maps and lies medial and inferior to visual field maps within motion…

Using functional MRI, we investigated whether auditory processing of both speech and meaningful non-linguistic environmental sounds in superior and middle temporal cortex relies on a complex and spatially distributed neural system. We found that evidence for spatially distributed processing of speech and environmental sounds in a substantial…

The influence of diet on cortical processing of syllables was examined at 3 and 6 months in 239 infants who were breastfed or fed milk or soy-based formula. Event-related potentials to syllables differing in voice-onset-time were recorded from placements overlying brain areas specialized for language processing. P1 component amplitude and latency…

Since Aristotle, people have believed that metaphors and similes express the same type of figurative meaning, despite the fact that they are expressed with different sentence patterns. In contrast, recent psycholinguistic models have suggested that metaphors and similes may promote different comprehension processes. In this study, we investigated…

Behavioral syntactic priming effects during sentence comprehension are typically observed only if both the syntactic structure and lexical head are repeated. In contrast, during production syntactic priming occurs with structure repetition alone, but the effect is boosted by repetition of the lexical head. We used fMRI to investigate the neuronal…

Functional neuroimaging studies of syntactic processing have been interpreted as identifying the neural locations of parsing and interpretive operations. However, current behavioral studies of sentence processing indicate that many operations occur simultaneously with parsing and interpretation. In this review, we point to issues that arise in…

Our goal was to characterize the effects of intensive aphasia therapy on the N400, an electrophysiological index of lexical-semantic processing. Immediately before and after 4 weeks of intensive speech-language therapy, people with aphasia performed a task in which they had to determine whether spoken words were a "match" or a "mismatch" to…