In the current ERP study, an active oddball task was carried out, testing pure tones and auditory, visual and audiovisual syllables. For pure tones, an MMN, an N2b, and a P3 were found, confirming traditional findings. Auditory syllables evoked an N2 and a P3. We found that the amplitude of the P3 depended on the distance between standard and…

In this study, we investigated how people deal with irrelevant contextual information during speech production. Two main models have been proposed. WEAVER++ assumes that irrelevant information is removed from the production system by an early blocking mechanism. On the other hand, the response exclusion hypothesis assumes a blocking mechanism that…

The neural mechanisms used in tone rises and falls in Mandarin were investigated. Nine participants were scanned while they named one-character pictures that required rising or falling tone responses in Mandarin: the left insula and right putamen showed stronger activation between rising and falling tones; the left brainstem showed weaker…

Previous studies have found a late frontal-central audiovisual interaction during the time period about 150-220 ms post-stimulus. However, it is unclear to which process is this audiovisual interaction related: to processing of acoustical features or to classification of stimuli? To investigate this question, event-related potentials were recorded…

This fMRI study was conducted to investigate whether language semantics is processed even when attention is not explicitly directed to word meanings. In the "unattended" condition, the subjects performed a visual detection task while hearing semantically related and unrelated word pairs. In the "phoneme" condition, the subjects made phoneme…

A common assumption is that phonetic sounds initiate unique processing in the superior temporal gyri and sulci (STG/STS). The anatomical areas subserving these processes are also implicated in the processing of non-phonetic stimuli such as music instrument sounds. The differential processing of phonetic and non-phonetic sounds was investigated in…

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…

This study examined the capability of the left hemisphere (LH) and the right hemisphere (RH) to perform a visual recognition task independently as formulated by the Direct Access Model (Fernandino, Iacoboni, & Zaidel, 2007). Healthy native Hebrew speakers were asked to categorize nouns and non-words (created from nouns by transposing two middle…

To identify neural regions that automatically respond to linguistically structured, but meaningless manual gestures, 14 deaf native users of American Sign Language (ASL) and 14 hearing non-signers passively viewed pseudosigns (possible but non-existent ASL signs) and non-iconic ASL signs, in addition to a fixation baseline. For the contrast…

This study examined the time course of object naming in 21 individuals with primary progressive aphasia (PPA) (8 agrammatic (PPA-G); 13 logopenic (PPA-L)) and healthy age-matched speakers (n=17) using a semantic interference paradigm with related and unrelated interfering stimuli presented at stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) of -1000, -500, -100…

Mouse ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs) are often used as behavioral readouts of internal states, to measure effects of social and pharmacological manipulations, and for behavioral phenotyping of mouse models for neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders. However, little is known about the neurobiological mechanisms of rodent USV production.…

Words are processed as units. This is not as evident as it seems, given the division of the human cerebral cortex in two hemispheres and the partial decussation of the optic tract. In two experiments, we investigated what underlies the unity of foveally presented words: A bilateral projection of visual input in foveal vision, or interhemispheric…

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 encoding of letter position is a key aspect in all recently proposed models of visual-word recognition. We analyzed the impact of lexical frequency on letter position assignment by examining the temporal dynamics of lexical activation induced by pseudowords extracted from words of different frequencies. For each word (e.g., BRIDGE), we created…

Using event-related potentials (ERPs), we investigated the N400 (an ERP component that occurs in response to meaningful stimuli) in children aged 8-10 years old and examined relationships between the N400 and individual differences in listening comprehension, word recognition and non-word decoding. Moreover, we tested the claim that the N400…