Magnetoencephalography (MEG) has shown pseudohomophone priming effects at Broca's area (specifically pars opercularis of left inferior frontal gyrus and precentral gyrus; LIFGpo/PCG) within [approximately]100 ms of viewing a word. This is consistent with Broca's area involvement in fast phonological access during visual word recognition. Here we…

Speech production can be broadly separated into two distinct components: Phonation and Articulation. These two aspects require the efficient control of several phono-articulatory effectors. Speech is indeed generated by the vibration of the vocal-folds in the larynx (F0) followed by "filtering" by articulators, to select certain resonant…

Processing and/or hemispheric differences in the neural bases of word recognition were examined in patients with long-standing, medically-intractable epilepsy localized to the left (N = 18) or right (N = 7) temporal lobe. Participants were asked to read words that varied in the frequency of their spelling-to-sound correspondences. For the right…

This study sought to discover if an optimum 1 cm[squared] area in the non-damaged right hemisphere (RH) was present, which could temporarily improve naming in chronic, nonfluent aphasia patients when suppressed with repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS). Ten minutes of slow, 1 Hz rTMS was applied to suppress different RH ROIs in…

What helps us determine whether a word is a noun or a verb, without conscious awareness? We report on cues in the way individual English words are spelled, and, for the first time, identify their neural correlates via functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We used a lexical decision task with trisyllabic nouns and verbs containing…

To determine structural brain correlates of naming abilities in older adults, we tested 24 individuals aged 56-79 on two confrontation-naming tests (the Boston Naming Test (BNT) and the Action Naming Test (ANT)), then collected from these individuals structural Magnetic-Resonance Imaging (MRI) and Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) data. Overall,…

One explanation for the inconsistencies in research examining the sentence comprehension abilities of the right hemisphere (RH) is the presence of confounding variables that have generally served to disadvantage the processing capacities of the RH. As such, the present study aimed to investigate hemispheric differences in the use of message-level…

The present functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study was designed, in order to investigate the neural substrates involved in the audiovisual processing of disyllabic German words and pseudowords. Twelve dyslexic and 13 nondyslexic adults performed a lexical decision task while stimuli were presented unimodally (either aurally or…

Huntington's disease (HD) patients show language production deficits that have been conceptualized as a consequence of executive disorders, e.g. selection deficit between candidate words or switching between word categories. More recently, a deficit of word generation specific to verbs has been reported, which might relate to impaired action…

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…

In this study, we investigated whether the left and right hemispheres are differentially involved in causal inference generation. Participants read short inference-promoting texts that described either familiar or less-familiar scenarios. After each text, they performed a lexical decision on a letter string (which sometimes constituted an…

It is widely accepted that the cerebellar and basal ganglia control circuits contribute to the programming of movement. Converging evidence from neuroimaging, limb control, and neuropsychological studies suggests that (1) people with cerebellar disease have reduced ability to program movement sequences in advance of movement onset and (2) people…

Although deficits in confrontation naming are a common consequence of damage to the language areas of the left cerebral hemisphere, some patients with aphasia show relatively good naming ability. We measured effects of repeated practice on naming latencies for a set of pictured objects by three aphasic patients with near-normal naming ability and…

We examined the effect of perceptual training on a well-established hemispheric asymmetry in speech processing. Eighteen listeners were trained to use a within-category difference in voice onset time (VOT) to cue talker identity. Successful learners (n = 8) showed faster response times for stimuli presented only to the left ear than for those…

Semantic priming refers to a reduction in the reaction time to identify or make a judgment about a stimulus that has been immediately preceded by a semantically related word or picture and is thought to result from a partial overlap in the semantic associates of the two words. A semantic priming lexical decision task using spoken words was…