Word finding difficulty is a frequently reported subjective cognitive concern among persons with Multiple Sclerosis (pwMS). Word-finding relies on several information retrieval processes, including search and retrieval from the conceptual store, the phonological store, the syllabary, as well as other stores of information. Neuropsychological…

Purpose: The fine-tuning of linguistic prosody in later childhood is poorly understood, and its neurological processing is even less well studied. In particular, it is unknown if grammatical processing of prosody is left- or rightlateralized in childhood versus adulthood and how phonological working memory might modulate such lateralization.…

The present study explored the origins of word learning in early infancy. Using event-related potentials (ERP) we monitored the brain activity of 3-month-old infants when they were repeatedly exposed to several initially novel words paired consistently with each the same initially novel objects or inconsistently with different objects. Our results…

School-aged and adolescent children continue to demonstrate improvements in how they integrate and comprehend real-time, auditory language over this developmental time period, which can have important implications for academic and social success. To better understand developmental changes in the neural processes engaged during language…

Background: The ability to generate words that follow certain constraints, or verbal fluency, is a sensitive indicator of neurocognitive impairment, and is impacted by a variety of variables. Aims: To investigate the effect of post-stroke aphasia, elicitation category and linguistic variables on verbal fluency performance. Methods &…

The study of development vacillates between a focus on change (i.e., studying how and why infants are so different from adults) and excitement about early competence and continuity (i.e., studying how capable infants are, and marveling at how similar they turn out to be to adults). The study of memory development has been no exception. This…

Older adults perform much like younger adults on language. This similar level of performance, however, may come about through different underlying brain processes. In the present study, we evaluated age-related differences in the brain areas outside the typical language areas among adults using a category decision task. Our results showed that…

Lexical-semantic knowledge is a core language component that undergoes prolonged development throughout childhood and is therefore highly amenable to developmental studies. Most previous lexical-semantic functional MRI (fMRI) studies have been limited to single-word or word-pair tasks, outside a sentence context. Our objective was to investigate…

Listening and reading comprehension of paragraph-length material are considered higher-order language skills fundamental to social and academic functioning. Using ecologically relevant language stimuli that were matched for difficulty according to developmental level, we analyze the effects of task, age, neuropsychological skills, and post-task…

As we age, our ability to select and to produce words changes, yet we know little about the underlying neural substrate of word-finding difficulties in old adults. This study was designed to elucidate changes in specific frontally mediated retrieval processes involved in word-finding difficulties associated with advanced age. We implemented two…

The aim of this study was to find the most prominent source of intersubject variability in neuronal activation for reading familiar words aloud. To this end, we collected functional imaging data from a large sample of subjects (n = 76) with different demographic characteristics such as handedness, sex, and age, while reading. The…

Compared to young, older adults are more likely to forget events that occurred in the past as well as remember events that never happened. Previous studies examining false memories and aging have shown that these memories are more likely to occur when new items share perceptual or semantic similarities with those presented during encoding. It is…

Overview: Behavioural data reveal an inverted U-shaped function in the efficiency of prospective memory from childhood to young adulthood to later adulthood. However, prior research has not directly compared processes contributing to age-related variation in prospective memory across the lifespan, hence it is unclear whether the same factors…