In this paper, we first introduce functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), followed by a review of three themes of neuroimaging research on the neural correlates of reading-related skills: (1) typical and struggling readers, including developmental dyslexics, (2) an inverted U-shaped function in second language reading that portrays an…

Recent research has shown that distinct event-related potential (ERP) signatures are associated with switching between languages compared to switching between dialects or registers (e.g., Khamis-Dakwar & Froud, 2007; Moreno, Federmeier & Kutas, 2002). The current investigation builds on these findings to examine whether contrastive and…

This thesis investigates the syntactic status of adjectives in Spanish through a crossdisciplinary perspective, incorporating methodologies from both theoretical linguistics and neurolinguistics, specifically, event-related potentials (ERPs). It presents conflicting theories about the syntax of adjectives and explores the ways that the processing…

The P600 is an event-related brain potential (ERP) typically associated with the processing of grammatical anomalies or incongruities. A similar response has also been observed in fully acceptable long-distance "wh"-dependencies. Such findings raise the question of whether these ERP responses reflect common underlying processes, and what…

Studies about bilingualism and second language acquisition (SLA) have a long tradition within linguistic and psycholinguistic research. The contributions from psycholinguistic research are crucial to the improvement of neurolinguistic models. This importance stems from the fact that psycholinguistic research is posing more specific questions than…

The majority of studies have demonstrated a right hemisphere (RH) advantage for the perception of emotions. Other studies have found that the involvement of each hemisphere is valence specific, with the RH better at perceiving negative emotions and the LH better at perceiving positive emotions [Reuter-Lorenz, P., & Davidson, R.J. (1981)…

Responds to previous studies on the relationship between event-related brain potential (ERP) responses to linguistic syntactic anomalies and domain-general unexpected events. After reviewing relevant data, this paper concludes that the ERP response to syntactic anomalies is at least partially distinct from the ERP response to unexpected anomalies…

In this paper we report the results of an experiment in which subjects read syntactically unambiguous and ambiguous sentences which were disambiguated after several words to the less likely possibility. Understanding such sentences involves building an initial structure, inhibiting the non-preferred structure, detecting that later input is…

The brain is the organ of knowledge and the organizer of human abilities, the means of recognizing a face in a crowd, of conversing about experiences and images, of forming thoughts and developing ideas, and of instantly understanding words coming rapidly in conversation. This book seeks to explain how the brain accomplishes all that it does.…

This book brings together the contributions of individual language scholars, linguists, anthropologists, psychologists, and neurophysicians. Each chapter focuses on the human cognitive processes involved in language activity and the impact of language diversity on them. The basic issue is how to correlate language diversity with the universality…