This study describes the case of a global alexic patient with a severe reading deficit affecting words, letters and Arabic numbers, following a left posterior lesion. The patient (VA) could not match spoken letters to their graphic form. A preserved ability to recognize shape and canonical orientation of letters indicates intact access to the…

Verbal repetition is conventionally considered to require motor-reproduction of only the phonologically relevant content of a perceived linguistic stimulus, while imitation of incidental acoustic properties of the stimulus is not an explicit part of this task. Exemplar-based theories of speech processing, however, would predict that imitation…

This fMRI study investigates how audiovisual integration differs for verbal stimuli that can be matched at a phonological level and nonverbal stimuli that can be matched at a semantic level. Subjects were presented simultaneously with one visual and one auditory stimulus and were instructed to decide whether these stimuli referred to the same…

Cognitive processing of lexical and sub-lexical stimuli was compared for good and poor adult phonological decoders. Sixteen good decoders and 16 poor decoders, average age 19 years, silently read 150 randomly computer presented sentences ending in incongruous regular, irregular, or nonwords and 100 congruent filler sentences.…

This study tested the hypotheses that people had a bias for drawing agents on the left of a picture when given a verb stimulus targeting an active or passive event (e.g., "kicked" or "is kicked") and that orthographic directionality would influence the way events were illustrated. Monolingual English speakers, who read and write left-to-right, and…

In this paper we examine a central issue in cognitive neuroscience: are there separate conceptual representations associated with different input modalities (e.g., Paivio, 1971, 1986; Warrington & Shallice, 1984) or do inputs from different modalities converge on to the same set of representations (e.g., Caramazza, Hillis, Rapp, & Romani, 1990;…

We report the case of a neonate tested three weeks after a neonatal left sylvian infarct. We studied her perception of speech and non-speech stimuli with high-density event-related potentials. The results show that she was able to discriminate not only a change of timbre in tones but also a vowel change, and even a place of articulation contrast…

The present study employs event related potentials (ERPs) to verify the utility of using electrophysiological measures to study developmental questions within the field of language comprehension. Established ERP components (N400 and P600) that reflect semantic and syntactic processing were examined. Fifteen adults and 14 children (ages 8-13)…