Language, believed to have originated from actions, not only functions as a medium to access other minds, but it also helps us commit actions and enriches our social life. This fMRI study investigated the semantic and neural representations of actions and mental states. We focused mainly on language semantics (comprehending sentences with "action"…

Counterfactual statements such as "if Mary had cleaned the room, she would have moved the sofa" convey both actual and hypothetical actions, namely, that Mary did not clean the room or move the sofa, but she would have done so in some possible past situation. Such statements are ubiquitous in daily life and are involved in critical cognitive…

For decades, category-specific semantic impairment--i.e., better comprehension of items from one semantic category than another--has been the driving force behind many claims about the organisation of conceptual knowledge in the brain. Double dissociations between patients with category-specific disorders are widely interpreted as showing that…

Models of how the human brain reconstructs an intended meaning from a linguistic input often draw upon the N400 event-related potential (ERP) component as evidence. Current accounts of the N400 emphasise either the role of contextually induced lexical preactivation of a critical word (Lau, Phillips, & Poeppel, 2008) or the ease of integration into…

The purpose of this study was to examine whether the N400 is affected by the semantic richness of associated neighboring word members or by the density of the orthographic syllable neighborhood. Another purpose of this study was to investigate the source of the different LPC in respect to the semantic richness. To do so, the density of the…

The neural mechanisms underlying the process of understanding novel and conventional metaphoric expressions remain unclear largely because the specific brain regions that support the formation of novel semantic relations are still unknown. A well established way to study distinct cognitive processes specifically associated with an event of…

Dual-process models suggest that recognition memory is independently supported by recollection and familiarity. Current theories attribute recollection solely to hippocampally mediated episodic memory (EM), and familiarity to both episodic and semantic memory (SM) supported by medial temporal lobe cortex (MTLC) and prefrontal cortex. We tested…

Work in theoretical linguistics and psycholinguistics suggests that human linguistic knowledge forms a continuum between individual lexical items and abstract syntactic representations, with most linguistic representations falling between the two extremes and taking the form of lexical items stored together with the syntactic/semantic contexts in…

Whereas most previous studies on emotion in language have focussed on single words, we investigated the influence of the emotional valence of a word on the syntactic and semantic processes unfolding during sentence comprehension, by means of event-related brain potentials (ERP). Experiment 1 assessed how positive, negative, and neutral adjectives…

Both taxonomic and thematic semantic relations have been studied extensively in behavioral studies and there is an emerging consensus that the anterior temporal lobe plays a particularly important role in the representation and processing of taxonomic relations, but the neural basis of thematic semantics is less clear. We used eye tracking to…

Humans have special abilities in processing hierarchical, recursive structures. Here we investigated how an upcoming word embedded in a hierarchical structure is semantically integrated into the prior representation during sentence comprehension. Participants read Chinese sentences with a complex verb argument structure "subject…

We begin with a theoretical overview of the concepts of recollection and familiarity, focusing, in the spirit of this special issue, on the important contributions made by Andrew Mayes. In particular, we discuss the issue of when the generation of semantically-related information in response to a retrieval cue might be experienced as recollection…

When relearning words, patients with semantic dementia (SD) exhibit a characteristic rigidity, including a failure to generalise names to untrained exemplars of trained concepts. This has been attributed to an over-reliance on the medial temporal region which captures information in sparse, non-overlapping and therefore rigid representations. The…

Empirically derived semantic feature norms categorized into different types of knowledge (e.g., visual, functional, auditory) can be summed to create number-of-feature counts per knowledge type. Initial evidence suggests several such knowledge types may be recruited during language comprehension. The present study provides a more detailed…

The "primary systems" view of reading disorders proposes that there are no neural regions devoted exclusively to reading, and therefore that acquired dyslexias should reliably co-occur with deficits in more general underlying capacities. This perspective predicted that surface dyslexia, a selective deficit in reading aloud "exception" words (those…