Retrieval of proper names is a cause of concern and complaint among elderly adults and it is an early symptom of patients suffering from neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease (AD). While it is well established that AD patients have deficits of proper name retrieval, the nature of such impairment is not yet fully understood.…

The most important information conveyed by language is often contained not in the utterance itself, but in the interaction between the utterance and the comprehender's knowledge of the world and the current situation. This dissertation uses psycholinguistic methods to explore the effects of a common type of inference--causal inference--on language…

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)…

The objective of our study is to introduce a fully automated, computational linguistic technique to quantify semantic relations between words generated on a standard semantic verbal fluency test and to determine its cognitive and clinical correlates. Cognitive differences between patients with Alzheimer's disease and mild cognitive impairment are…

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…

To understand the meanings of words and objects, we need to have knowledge about these items themselves plus executive mechanisms that compute and manipulate semantic information in a task-appropriate way. The neural basis for semantic control remains controversial. Neuroimaging studies have focused on the role of the left inferior frontal gyrus…

The role of the anterior temporal lobe (ATL) in semantic memory is now firmly established. There is still controversy, however, regarding the specific role of this region in processing various types of concepts. There have been reports of patients suffering from semantic dementia (SD), a neurodegenerative condition in which the ATL is damaged…

A number of recent studies have shown that some patients with pure alexia display evidence of implicit access to lexical and semantic information about words that they cannot read explicitly. This phenomenon has not been investigated systematically in Chinese patients. We report here a case study of a Chinese patient who met the criteria for pure…

While many behavioural studies on refractory phenomena in lexical/semantic access have focused on the mechanisms involved in the oral production of names, comprehension tasks have been almost exclusively used in neuropsychological studies on brain damaged patients. We report the results of two experiments on healthy participants conducted by means…

Apraxic patients are known for deficits in producing and comprehending skilled movements. Two experiments tested their implicit and explicit knowledge about manipulable objects in order to examine whether such deficits accompany impairment in the conceptual representation of manipulation features. An eyetracking method was used to test implicit…

This paper investigates the cognitive processes underlying picture naming and auditory word repetition. In the two-step model of lexical access, both the semantic and phonological steps are involved in naming, but the former has no role in repetition. Assuming recognition of the to-be-repeated word, repetition could consist of retrieving the…

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to investigate the neural processing characteristics associated with word retrieval abilities after a phonologically-based treatment for anomia in two stroke patients with aphasia. Neural activity associated with a phonological and a semantic task was compared before and after treatment with…

Repetition priming (RP) has been employed as a measure of implicit processing in patients suffering from a breakdown of semantic memory, as in the case of semantic dementia (SD), a subtype of frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD). Here, we investigated face-name representation in a case of SD using a paradigm of within- and cross-domain…

Arithmetic skills are generally claimed to be preserved in semantic dementia (SD), suggesting functional independence of arithmetic knowledge from other aspects of semantic memory. However, in a recent case series analysis we showed that arithmetic performance in SD is not entirely normal. The finding of a direct association between severity of…

Contemporary neural models of auditory language comprehension proposed that the two hemispheres are differently specialized in the processing of segmental and suprasegmental features of language. While segmental processing of syntactic and lexical semantic information is predominantly assigned to the left hemisphere, the right hemisphere is…