To identify neural regions that automatically respond to linguistically structured, but meaningless manual gestures, 14 deaf native users of American Sign Language (ASL) and 14 hearing non-signers passively viewed pseudosigns (possible but non-existent ASL signs) and non-iconic ASL signs, in addition to a fixation baseline. For the contrast…

Pitch processing is lateralized to the right hemisphere; linguistic pitch is further mediated by left cortical areas. This experiment investigates whether ear asymmetries vary in brainstem representation of pitch depending on linguistic status. Brainstem frequency-following responses (FFRs) were elicited by monaural stimulation of the left and…

Experience-dependent enhancement of neural encoding of pitch in the auditory brainstem has been observed for only specific portions of native pitch contours exhibiting high rates of pitch acceleration, irrespective of speech or nonspeech contexts. This experiment allows us to determine whether this language-dependent advantage transfers to…

The present functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study was designed, in order to investigate the neural substrates involved in the audiovisual processing of disyllabic German words and pseudowords. Twelve dyslexic and 13 nondyslexic adults performed a lexical decision task while stimuli were presented unimodally (either aurally or…

An influential hypothesis regarding the neural basis of the mental lexicon is that semantic representations are neurally implemented as distributed networks carrying sensory, motor and/or more abstract functional information. This work investigates whether the semantic properties of words partly determine the topography of such networks. Subjects…

It was hypothesized that stuttering may be related to impaired sensory gating, leading to overflow of superfluous disturbing auditory feedback and breakdown of the speech sequence. This hypothesis was tested using the "acoustic startle prepulse inhibition" (PPI) paradigm. A group of 22 adults with developmental stuttering were compared…

Specific reading disability (SRD) is now widely recognised as often being caused by phonological processing problems, affecting analysis of spoken as well as written language. According to one theoretical account, these phonological problems are due to low-level problems in auditory perception of dynamic acoustic cues. Evidence for this has come…

The Wada test is at present the method of choice for preoperative assessment of patients who require surgery close to cortical language areas. It is, however, an invasive test with an attached morbidity risk. By now, an alternative to the Wada test is to combine a lexical word generation paradigm with non-invasive imaging techniques. However,…