Concrete symbols (e.g., "sun," "run") can be learned in the context of objects and actions, thereby grounding their meaning in the world. However, it is controversial whether a comparable avenue to semantic learning exists for abstract symbols (e.g., "democracy"). When we simulated the putative brain mechanisms of…

An over-arching goal in neurolinguistic research is to characterize the neural bases of semantic representation. A particularly relevant goal concerns whether we represent features and events (a) together in a generalized semantic hub or (b) separately in distinct but complementary systems. While the left anterior temporal lobe (ATL) is strongly…

The present study examines the representation and composition of meaning in scalar implicatures. Scalar implicature is the phenomenon whereby the use of a less informative term (e.g., "some") is inferred to mean the negation of a more informative term (e.g., to mean "not all"). The experiments reported here investigate how the…

Studies about bilingualism and second language acquisition (SLA) have a long tradition within linguistic and psycholinguistic research. The contributions from psycholinguistic research are crucial to the improvement of neurolinguistic models. This importance stems from the fact that psycholinguistic research is posing more specific questions than…

The present fMRI study of semantic fluency for animal and tool names provides further evidence for category-specific brain activations, and reports task-related changes in effective connectivity among defined cerebral regions. Two partially segregated systems of functional integration were highlighted: the tool condition was associated with an…

In this study, we used a novel cognitive paradigm and event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (ER-fMRI) to investigate the neural substrates involved in processing three different types of sentences. Participants read either metaphoric ("Some surgeons are butchers"), literal ("Some surgeons are fathers"), or non-meaningful sentences…

Event-related potential (ERP) studies have shown that emotional stimuli elicit greater amplitude late positive-polarity potentials (LPPs) than neutral stimuli. This effect has been attributed to arousal, but emotional stimuli are also more semantically coherent than uncategorized neutral stimuli. ERPs were recorded during encoding of positive,…

Readers construct at least two interrelated representations when they comprehend a text: (a) a representation of the explicit ideas in a text and the relations among them (i.e., a propositional representation) and (b) a representation of the context or situation to which a text refers (i.e., a discourse model). In a recent study, Long and Baynes…

This study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine brain-behavior correlations in a group of 16 children (9- to 12-year-olds). Activation was measured during a semantic judgment task presented in either the visual or auditory modality that required the individual to determine whether a final word was related in meaning to one…

This book brings together the contributions of individual language scholars, linguists, anthropologists, psychologists, and neurophysicians. Each chapter focuses on the human cognitive processes involved in language activity and the impact of language diversity on them. The basic issue is how to correlate language diversity with the universality…