Whereas most previous studies on emotion in language have focussed on single words, we investigated the influence of the emotional valence of a word on the syntactic and semantic processes unfolding during sentence comprehension, by means of event-related brain potentials (ERP). Experiment 1 assessed how positive, negative, and neutral adjectives…

Humans have special abilities in processing hierarchical, recursive structures. Here we investigated how an upcoming word embedded in a hierarchical structure is semantically integrated into the prior representation during sentence comprehension. Participants read Chinese sentences with a complex verb argument structure "subject…

Previous research indicates that, under explicit instructions to listen to spoken stimuli or in speech-oriented behavioural tasks, the brain's responses to senseless pseudowords are larger than those to meaningful words; the reverse is true in non-attended conditions. These differential responses could be used as a tool to trace linguistic…

Empirically derived semantic feature norms categorized into different types of knowledge (e.g., visual, functional, auditory) can be summed to create number-of-feature counts per knowledge type. Initial evidence suggests several such knowledge types may be recruited during language comprehension. The present study provides a more detailed…

An event-related brain potentials (ERP) experiment was carried out to investigate how and when accentuation influences temporally selective attention and subsequent semantic processing during on-line spoken language comprehension, and how the effect of accentuation on attention allocation and semantic processing changed with the degree of…

Patients with multimodal semantic impairment following stroke (referred to here as "semantic aphasia" or SA) fail to show the standard effects of frequency in comprehension tasks. Instead, they show absent or even "reverse" frequency effects: i.e., better understanding of less common words. In addition, SA is associated with poor regulatory…

Wernicke's aphasia (WA) is the classical neurological model of comprehension impairment and, as a result, the posterior temporal lobe is assumed to be critical to semantic cognition. This conclusion is potentially confused by (a) the existence of patient groups with semantic impairment following damage to other brain regions (semantic dementia and…

Sensorimotor representations in the brain encode the sensory and motor aspects of one's own bodily activity. It is highly debated whether sensorimotor representations are the core basis for the representation of action-related knowledge and, in particular, action words, such as verbs. In this review, we will address this question by bringing to…

Unagreement patterns consist in a person feature mismatch between subject and verb that is nonetheless grammatical in Spanish. The processing of this type of construction gives new insights into the understanding of agreement processes during language comprehension. Here, we contrasted oscillatory brain activity triggered by Unagreement in…

Spoken language comprehension is known to involve a large left-dominant network of fronto-temporal brain regions, but there is still little consensus about how the syntactic and semantic aspects of language are processed within this network. In an fMRI study, volunteers heard spoken sentences that contained either syntactic or semantic ambiguities…

This study examined how the two cerebral hemispheres recruit semantic processing mechanisms by combining event-related potential measures and visual half-field methods in a word priming paradigm in which semantic strength and predictability were manipulated using lexically associated word pairs. Activation patterns on the late positive complex…

In several domains of psychology it has been shown that mood influences the way in which we process information. So far, little is known about the relation between mood and processes of language comprehension. In the present study we explore, whether, and if so how, mood affects the processing of syntactic anomalies in real time by recording…

Logic has been intertwined with the study of language and meaning since antiquity, and such connections persist in present day research in linguistic theory (formal semantics) and cognitive psychology (e.g., studies of human reasoning). However, few studies in cognitive neuroscience have addressed logical dimensions of sentence-level language…

Previous research has suggested that a failure in processing contextual information may account for the heterogeneous clinical manifestations and cognitive impairments observed in schizophrenia. In the domain of language, context processing in schizophrenia has been investigated mostly with single-word semantic priming paradigms; however, natural…

We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate whether activation in Broca's area is greater during the processing of passive versus active sentences in the brains of healthy subjects. Twenty Japanese native speakers performed a visual sentence comprehension task in which they were asked to read a visually presented sentence…