Models of how the human brain reconstructs an intended meaning from a linguistic input often draw upon the N400 event-related potential (ERP) component as evidence. Current accounts of the N400 emphasise either the role of contextually induced lexical preactivation of a critical word (Lau, Phillips, & Poeppel, 2008) or the ease of integration into…

The purpose of this study was to examine whether the N400 is affected by the semantic richness of associated neighboring word members or by the density of the orthographic syllable neighborhood. Another purpose of this study was to investigate the source of the different LPC in respect to the semantic richness. To do so, the density of the…

Work in theoretical linguistics and psycholinguistics suggests that human linguistic knowledge forms a continuum between individual lexical items and abstract syntactic representations, with most linguistic representations falling between the two extremes and taking the form of lexical items stored together with the syntactic/semantic contexts in…

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…

Both taxonomic and thematic semantic relations have been studied extensively in behavioral studies and there is an emerging consensus that the anterior temporal lobe plays a particularly important role in the representation and processing of taxonomic relations, but the neural basis of thematic semantics is less clear. We used eye tracking to…

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…

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…

In this article we aimed to assess how Alzheimer's disease (AD), which is neurodegenerative, affects the linguistic performance of early, high-proficient bilinguals in their two languages. To this end, we compared the Picture Naming and Word Translation performances of two groups of AD patients varying in disease progression (Mild and Moderate)…

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…

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…

Patients with letter-by-letter alexia may have residual access to lexical or semantic representations of words despite severely impaired overt word recognition (reading). Here, we report a multilingual patient with severe letter-by-letter alexia who rapidly identified the language of written words and sentences in French and English while he had…

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…

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…

Healthy adults can identify spoken words at a remarkable speed, by incrementally analyzing word-onset information. It is currently unknown how this adult-level speed of spoken-word processing emerges during children's native-language acquisition. In a picture-word mismatch paradigm, we manipulated the semantic congruency between picture contexts…