Many patients with primary progressive aphasia (PPA) are impaired in syntactic production. Because most previous studies of expressive syntax in PPA have relied on quantitative analysis of connected speech samples, which is a relatively unconstrained task, it is not well understood which specific syntactic structures are most challenging for these…

Recent ERP findings challenge the widespread assumption that syntactic and semantic processes are tightly coupled. Syntactically well-formed sentences that are semantically anomalous due to thematic mismatches elicit a P600, the component standardly associated with syntactic anomaly. This "thematic P600" effect has been attributed to detection of…

In Spanish, objects and events at subject position constrain the selection of different forms of the auxiliary verb "to be": locative predicates about objects require "estar en", while those relating to events require "ser en", both translatable as "to be in". Subjective ratings showed that while the "object + ser + en" is considered as incorrect,…

This paper reports a conjunction analysis between semantic relatedness judgment and semantic associate generation of Chinese nouns and verbs with concrete or abstract meanings. The results revealed a verb-specific task-independent region in LpSTG&MTG, and task-dependent activation in a left frontal region in semantic judgment and the left SMG in…

The hypothesized role of Broca's area in sentence processing ranges from domain-general executive function to domain-specific computation that is specific to certain syntactic structures. We examined this issue by manipulating syntactic structure and conflict between syntactic and semantic cues in a sentence processing task. Functional…

Models of speaking distinguish producing meaning, words and syntax as three different linguistic components of speaking. Nevertheless, little is known about the brain's integrated neuronal infrastructure for speech production. We investigated semantic, lexical and syntactic aspects of speaking using fMRI. In a picture description task, we…

Electrophysiological studies investigating similarities between music and language perception have relied exclusively on the signal averaging technique, which does not adequately represent oscillatory aspects of electrical brain activity that are relevant for higher cognition. The current study investigated the patterns of brain oscillations…

Recent ERP studies report that implausible verb-argument combinations can elicit a centro-parietal P600 effect (e.g., "The hearty meal was devouring..."; Kim & Osterhout, 2005). Such eliciting conditions do not involve outright syntactic anomaly, deviating from previous reports of P600. Kim and Osterhout (2005) attributed such P600 effects to…

This study investigates how syntactic and semantic load factors impact sentence comprehension and BOLD signal under moderate hypoglycemia. A dual session, whole brain fMRI study was conducted on 16 healthy participants using the glucose clamp technique. In one session, they experienced insulin-induced hypoglycemia (plasma glucose at [image…

The sentences we process in normal conversation tend to refer to information that we are familiar with rather than abstract, unrelated information. This allows for the use of knowledge stores to help facilitate comprehension processes. In many sentence comprehension studies, the stimuli are designed such that the use of world knowledge is limited.…

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"),…

Neuroscience has greatly improved our understanding of the brain basis of abstract lexical and semantic processes. The neuronal devices underlying words and concepts are distributed neuronal assemblies reaching into sensory and motor systems of the cortex and, at the cognitive level, information binding in such widely dispersed circuits is…

Agrammatic aphasic individuals exhibit marked production deficits for tense morphology. This paper presents three experiments examining whether a group of English-speaking agrammatic individuals (n = 10) exhibit parallel deficits in their comprehension of tense. Results from two comprehension experiments (on-line grammaticality judgment studies)…

Neuroimaging studies have shown that the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) plays a critical role in semantic and syntactic aspects of speech comprehension. It appears to be recruited when listeners are required to select the appropriate meaning or syntactic role for words within a sentence. However, this region is also recruited during tasks not…

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…