A contentious issue in memory research is whether verbal short-term memory (STM) depends on a neural system specifically dedicated to the temporary maintenance of information, or instead relies on the same brain areas subserving the comprehension and production of language. In this study, we examined a large sample of adults with acquired brain…

Verbal short-term memory (VSTM) is thought to play a critical role in language learning. It is indexed by the nonword repetition task where listeners are asked to repeat meaningless words like "blonterstaping". The present study investigated the effect on nonword repetition performance of differences in efficiency of functioning of some part of…

We investigated the association between yes/no sentence comprehension and dysfunction in anterior and posterior left-hemisphere cortical regions in acute stroke patients. More specifically, we manipulated whether questions were Nonreversible (e.g., Are limes sour?) or Reversible (e.g., Is a horse larger than a dog?) to investigate the regions…

The aim of this study was to investigate individual differences in the influence of lexical association on word recognition during auditory sentence processing. Lexical associations among individual words (e.g. salt and pepper) represent one type of semantic information that is available during the processing of words in context. We predicted that…

Patients with apparently selective short-term memory (STM) deficits for semantic information have played an important role in developing multi-store theories of STM and challenge the idea that verbal STM is supported by maintaining activation in the language system. We propose that semantic STM deficits are not as selective as previously thought…

Children born preterm are at risk for deficits in language and reading. They are also at risk for injury to the white matter of the brain. The goal of this study was to determine whether performance in language and reading skills would be associated with white matter properties in children born preterm and full-term. Children born before 36 weeks…

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…

Although activity in premotor and motor cortices is commonly observed in neuroimaging studies of spoken language processing, the degree to which this activity is an obligatory part of everyday speech comprehension remains unclear. We hypothesised that rather than being a unitary phenomenon, the neural response to speech perception in motor regions…

The current study compared the neural correlates of associative retrieval of compound (unitized) stimuli and unrelated (non-unitized) stimuli. Although associative recognition was nearly identical for compounds and unrelated pairs, accurate recognition of these different pair types was associated with activation in distinct regions within the…

Although studies of long-term outcomes of children born preterm consistently show low intelligence quotient (IQ) and visual-motor impairment, studies of their performance in language and reading have found inconsistent results. In this study, we examined which specific language and reading skills were associated with prematurity independent of the…

The present study contrasted the neural correlates of encoding item-context associations according to whether the contextual information was visual or auditory. Subjects (N = 20) underwent fMRI scanning while studying a series of visually presented pictures, each of which co-occurred with either a visually or an auditorily presented name. The task…

Previous research suggests that the right hemisphere (RH) may contribute uniquely to discourse and text processing by activating and maintaining a wide range of meanings, including more distantly related meanings. The present study used the word-lists false memory paradigm [Roediger, H. L., III, & McDermott, K. B. (1995). "Creating false memories:…

The triple-code model, cognitive neuroimaging and developmental behavioral data suggest a specific association between phonological processing and arithmetic fact retrieval. Accordingly, individuals with deficits in phonological processing, such as individuals with developmental dyslexia, are expected to show difficulties in arithmetic fact…

Patients with semantic dementia show a specific pattern of impairment on both verbal and non-verbal "pre-semantic" tasks, e.g., reading aloud, past tense generation, spelling to dictation, lexical decision, object decision, colour decision and delayed picture copying. All seven tasks are characterised by poorer performance for items that are…

The current study investigated the relevance of semantic processing and stimulus salience for memory performance in young ADHD patients and healthy control participants. 18 male ADHD patients and 15 healthy control children and adolescents participated in an ERP study during a visual memory paradigm with two different encoding tasks requiring…