Category-specific deficits have rarely been reported in semantic dementia (SD). To our knowledge, only four previous studies have documented category-specific deficits, and these have focused on the living versus non-living things contrast rather than on more fine-grained semantic categories. This study aimed to determine whether a…

The encoding of letter position is a key aspect in all recently proposed models of visual-word recognition. We analyzed the impact of lexical frequency on letter position assignment by examining the temporal dynamics of lexical activation induced by pseudowords extracted from words of different frequencies. For each word (e.g., BRIDGE), we created…

We investigated whether and when information conveyed by spoken language impacts on the processing of visually presented objects. In contrast to traditional views, grounded-cognition posits direct links between language comprehension and perceptual processing. We used a magnetoencephalographic cross-modal priming paradigm to disentangle these…

In this study, event-related potentials (ERPs) were used to trace the temporal dynamics of phonological consistency and phonetic combinability in the reading of Chinese phonograms. The data showed a significant consistency-by-combinability interaction at N170. High phonetic combinability characters elicited greater negativity at N170 than did low…

Developmental dyslexia is the most common learning disability in school-aged children with an estimated incidence of five to ten percent. The cause and pathophysiological substrate of this developmental disorder is unclear. Recently, a possible involvement of the cerebellum in the pathogenesis of dyslexia has been postulated. In this study, 15…

Agrammatic aphasic individuals exhibit marked production deficits for tense morphology. This paper presents three experiments examining whether a group of English-speaking agrammatic individuals (n = 10) exhibit parallel deficits in their comprehension of tense. Results from two comprehension experiments (on-line grammaticality judgment studies)…

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…

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…

There is abundant evidence from behavioral and neurophysiological experiments for the distinction of natural versus artifactual categories and a gender-specific difference: women's performances in cognitive tasks increase when natural categories are used, whereas men's performances increase with artifactual categories. Here, we used the semantic…

Within a discrete two-stage model of lexicalization, semantic errors and errors of omission are assumed to be independent events. In contrast, cascading and interactive models allow for an influence of word form on lexical selection and thus for an inherent relationship in accounting for both error types. A group of 17 aphasic patients was…

The present study examined the manner in which both hemispheres utilize prior semantic context and relative meaning frequency during the processing of homographs. Participants read sentences biased toward the dominant or the subordinate meaning of their final homograph, or unbiased neutral sentences, and performed a lexical decision task on…

Event-related potentials were recorded in a paradigm where an unrelated word was interposed between two related words. In one condition, the intervening item was masked and in another condition it was not. The N400 component indicated that priming of the related word was disrupted by the intervening item whether it was masked or not. The data are…

In this paper, we investigate the interplay between phonological facilitation and semantic interference effects in picture naming. We use a double distractor variant of the classic picture-word interference paradigm to investigate whether the reported interaction between these effects is dependent on the two types of related information being…

Spoken language comprehension requires the coordination of different subprocesses in time. After the initial acoustic analysis the system has to extract segmental information such as phonemes, syntactic elements and lexical-semantic elements as well as suprasegmental information such as accentuation and intonational phrases, i.e., prosody.…

Models of speech production disagree on whether or not homonyms have a shared word-form representation. To investigate this issue, a picture-naming experiment was carried out using Dutch homonyms of which both meanings could be presented as a picture. Naming latencies for the low-frequency meanings of homonyms were slower than for those of the…