Purpose: Investigations into the nature of communication disorders in autistic individuals increasingly evaluate neural responses to speech stimuli. This integrative review aimed to consolidate the available data related to speech and language processing across levels of stimulus complexity (from single speech sounds to sentences) and to relate it…

This project used Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) to explore neurophysiological brain responses to prepositional phrases involving concrete and abstract reference nouns (e.g., "plate" and "moment," respectively) after the presentation of objects with varying spatial features. Prepositional phrases were headed by "in"…

In this study we investigated whether the human brain distinguishes between telic events that necessarily entail a specified endpoint (e.g., "reaching"), and atelic events with no delimitation or final state (e.g., "chasing"). We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to explore the patterns of neural response associated with verbs denoting…

The hypothesized role of Broca's area in sentence processing ranges from domain-general executive function to domain-specific computation that is specific to certain syntactic structures. We examined this issue by manipulating syntactic structure and conflict between syntactic and semantic cues in a sentence processing task. Functional…

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…

There is a discrepancy between the brain regions revealed by functional neuroimaging techniques and those brain regions where a loss of function, either by lesion or by electrocortical stimulation, induces language disorders. To differentiate between essential and non-essential language-related processes, we investigated the effects of linguistic…

A quantitative, coordinate-based meta-analysis combined data from 354 participants across 22 fMRI studies and one positron emission tomography (PET) study to identify the differences in neural correlates of figurative and literal language processing, and to investigate the role of the right hemisphere (RH) in figurative language processing.…

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 have two separate levels of meaning. One level reflects the uniqueness of every verb and is called the "root". The other level consists of a more austere representation that is shared by all the verbs in a given class and is called the "event structure template". We explore the following hypotheses about how, with specific reference to the…

How long does it take the human mind to grasp the idea when hearing or reading a sentence? Neurophysiological methods looking directly at the time course of brain activity indexes of comprehension are critical for finding the answer to this question. As the dominant cognitive approaches, models of serial/cascaded and parallel processing, make…

This study reports on the characteristics and distribution of naming errors of patients undergoing cortical stimulation mapping (CSM). During the procedure, electrical stimulation is used to induce temporary functional lesions and locate "essential" language areas for preservation. Under stimulation, patients are shown slides of common objects and…

Previous neuroimaging research has attempted to demonstrate a preferential involvement of the human mirror neuron system (MNS) in the comprehension of effector-related action word (verb) meanings. These studies have assumed that Broca's area (or Brodmann's area 44) is the homologue of a monkey premotor area (F5) containing mouth and hand mirror…

We develop the view that the involvement of mirror neurons in embodied experience grounds brain structures that underlie language, but that many other brain regions are involved. We stress the cooperation between the dorsal and ventral streams in praxis and language. Both have perceptual and motor schemas but the perceptual schemas in the dorsal…

Logic has been intertwined with the study of language and meaning since antiquity, and such connections persist in present day research in linguistic theory (formal semantics) and cognitive psychology (e.g., studies of human reasoning). However, few studies in cognitive neuroscience have addressed logical dimensions of sentence-level language…

The embodied cognition approach to the study of the mind proposes that higher order mental processes such as concept formation and language are essentially based on perceptual and motor processes. Contrary to the classical approach in cognitive science, in which concepts are viewed as amodal, arbitrary symbols, embodied semantics argues that…