The immediate and long-term neural correlates of linguistic processing deficits reported following paediatric and adolescent traumatic brain injury (TBI) are poorly understood. Therefore, the current research investigated event-related potentials (ERPs) elicited during a semantic picture-word priming experiment in two groups of highly functioning…

Verbs contain multifaceted information about both the semantics of an action, and potential argument structures. Linguistic theory classifies verbs according to whether the denoted action has an inherent (telic) end-point ("fall," "awaken"), or whether it is considered homogenous, or atelic ("read," "worship"). The aim of our study was to examine…

The aim of the present study was to examine the communicative abilities of traumatic brain injury patients (TBI). We wish to provide a complete assessment of their communicative ability/disability using a new experimental protocol, the "Assessment Battery of Communication," ("ABaCo") comprising five scales--linguistic, extralinguistic,…

This study looks at whether conventional and anomalous metaphors are processed in different locations in the brain while being read when compared with a literal condition in Mandarin Chinese. We find that conventional metaphors differ from the literal condition with a slight amount of increased activation in the right inferior temporal gyrus. In…

Linguists distinguish between words formed from free stems (e.g., "actor": "act") and those formed from bound stems (e.g., "spectator": "spect"). In a forward masked priming task, we observed significant morphological facilitation for prime-target pairs that shared either a free (e.g., "deform"--"CONFORM") or a bound (e.g., "revive"--"SURVIVE")…

The current study addresses the debate between so-called "structural" and "processing limitation" accounts of aphasia, i.e., whether language impairments reflect the "loss" of linguistic knowledge or its representations, or instead reflect a limitation in processing resources. Confrontation-naming task and category-judgment tasks were used to…

The present work investigated cognitive, linguistic and narrative abilities in a group of children suffering from Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, an allelic X-linked recessive disorder caused by mutations in the gene encoding dystrophin. The patients showed mildly reduced IQ with lower Verbal than Performance Intelligence Quotient and were mildly…

We examined the development of some features of morphosyntactic ability, specifically the acquisition of auxiliaries and use of agreement marking, along with sentence processing capacity. We used a conceptually simple task called the Tags Question Task, which is a method for evaluating a number of language processes in the production of a commonly…