Background: Aphasia is often accompanied by impairment of non-language cognitive functions. Assessment of cognitive capacity in people with aphasia (PWA) with standard neuropsychological methods may be problematic due to their language difficulties. Numerous experimental studies indicate that P300 may be considered as an index of cognitive…

Purpose: Emotional verbal fluency (Emo-VF) has the potential to expand neuropsychological assessment by providing information about affective memory retrieval. The usability of Emo-VF is limited, however, by significant variations in task administration and the lack of information about Emo-VF responses. This study investigated verbal productivity…

Introduction: Baddeley's model of working memory establishes the basis for identifying components that intervene in immediate repetition verbal tasks. Based on this model, the overall aim of the present study was to analyze the relationship between auditory sequential memory and verbal memory in students with intellectual disabilities and thereby…

Background: Alzheimer's disease is characterized by macrolinguistic changes. This decline is often analyzed with quantitative scales. Aims: To analyze discourse production in early Alzheimer's disease (AD) and to identify qualitative markers of macrolinguistic decline. Methods & Procedures: We analyzed macrolinguistic features of a clinical…

The study of homophones--words with different meanings that sound the same--has great potential to inform models of language production. Of particular relevance is a phenomenon termed "frequency" inheritance, where a low-frequency word (e.g., "deer") is produced more fluently than would be expected based on its frequency…

A theoretical framework which considers the verbal functions of the brain under a multivariate and comprehensive cognitive model was statistically analyzed. A confirmatory factor analysis was performed to verify whether some recognized aphasia constructs can be hierarchically integrated as latent factors from a homogenously verbal test. The Brief…

Background: Temporal information processing (TIP) underlies many aspects of cognitive functions like language, motor control, learning, memory, attention, etc. Millisecond timing may be assessed by sequencing abilities, e.g. the perception of event order. It may be measured with auditory temporal-order-threshold (TOT), i.e. a minimum time gap…

Current research on analogy processing assumes that different conceptual relations are treated similarly. However, just as words and concepts are related in distinct ways, different kinds of analogies may employ distinct types of relationships. An important distinction in how words are related is the difference between associative (dog-bone) and…

Humans have an unparalleled ability to represent objects as members of multiple categories. A given object, such as a pillow may be--depending on current task demands--represented as an instance of something that is soft, as something that contains feathers, as something that is found in bedrooms, or something that is larger than a toaster. This…

We used structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and voxel based morphometry (VBM) to investigate whether the efficiency of word processing in the non-native language (lexical efficiency) and the number of non-native languages spoken (2+ versus 1) were related to local differences in the brain structure of bilingual and multilingual speakers.…

A central topic in cognitive neuroscience concerns the representation of concepts and the specific neural mechanisms that mediate conceptual knowledge. Recently proposed modal theories assert that concepts are grounded on the integration of multimodal, distributed representations. The aim of the present work is to complement the available…

Previous neuropsychological studies on acquired dyslexia revealed a double dissociation in reading impairments. Patients with phonological dyslexia have selective difficulty in reading pseudo-words, while those with surface dyslexia misread exception words. This double dissociation in reading abilities has often been reported in brain-damaged…

Verbal fluency is a widely used neuropsychological paradigm. In fMRI implementations, conventional unpaced (self-paced) versions are suboptimal due to uncontrolled timing of responses, and overt responses carry the risk of motion artifact. We investigated the behavioral and neurofunctional effects of response pacing and overt speech in semantic…

In three experiments, we tested the hypothesis that those errors in immediate serial recall (ISR) that are attributable to phonological confusability share a locus with segmental errors in normal speech production. In the first two experiments, speech errors were elicited in the repeated paced reading of six-letter lists. The errors mirrored the…

This study examines sentence-level language abilities of amnesic H.M. to test competing theoretical conceptions of relations between language and memory. We present 11 new sources of experimental evidence indicating deficits in H.M's comprehension and production of non-cliche sentences. Contrary to recent claims that H.M.'s comprehension is…