Agrammatism is a frequent sequela of Broca's aphasia that manifests itself in omission and/or substitution of the grammatical morphemes in spontaneous and constrained speech. The hierarchical structure of syntactic trees has been proposed as an account for difficulty across grammatical morphemes (e.g., tense, agreement, and negation). Supporting…

The ability to perform relational proposition-based reasoning was assessed in younger and older adults using the transitive inference task in which subjects learned a series of premise pairs (A greater than B, B greater than C, C greater than D, D greater than E, E greater than F) and were asked to make inference judgments (B?D, B?E, C?E).…

Difficulties with pragmatic aspects of communication are universal across individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). Here we focused on an aspect of pragmatic language comprehension that is relevant to social interaction in daily life: the integration of speaker characteristics inferred from the voice with the content of a message. Using…

Limited research has been conducted on the structure of the pars triangularis (PT) in dyslexia despite functional neuroimaging research finding it may play a role in phonological processing. Furthermore, research to date has not examined PT size in ADHD even though the right inferior frontal region has been implicated in the disorder. Hence, one…

This study was aimed at revealing which cognitive processes are lateralized in visual categorizations of "humans" by pigeons. To this end, pigeons were trained to categorize pictures of humans and then tested binocularly or monocularly (left or right eye) on the learned categorization and for transfer to novel exemplars (Experiment 1). Subsequent…

Recent data have shown that parallel processing by the cerebral hemispheres can expand the capacity of visual working memory for spatial locations (J. F. Delvenne, 2005) and attentional tracking (G. A. Alvarez & P. Cavanagh, 2005). Evidence that parallel processing by the cerebral hemispheres can improve item identification has remained elusive.…

Cognitive control mechanisms permit memory to be accessed strategically, and so aid in bringing knowledge to mind that is relevant to current goals and actions. In this review, we consider the contribution of left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC) to the cognitive control of memory. Reviewed evidence supports a two-process model of mnemonic…

Pavlovian fear conditioning is a robust and enduring form of emotional learning that provides an ideal model system for studying contextual regulation of memory retrieval. After extinction the expression of fear conditional responses (CRs) is context-specific: A conditional stimulus (CS) elicits greater conditional responding outside compared with…

Adult male Long-Evans rats were trained to run in a straight-alley maze for food reward and subsequently received hippocampus-dependent latent extinction training. Immediately following latent extinction, rats received peripheral injections of the NMDA receptor partial agonist D-cycloserine (DCS, 15 mg/kg), or saline. Twenty-four hours later, rats…

This paper provides a brief review of various uses of magnetic resonance perfusion imaging in the investigation of brain/language relationships. The reviewed studies illustrate how perfusion imaging can reveal areas of brain where dysfunction due to low blood flow is associated with specific language deficits, and where restoration of blood flow…

Upon stimulation, areas of the brain associated with specific cognitive processing tasks may undergo observable physiological changes, and measures of such changes have been used to create brain maps for visualization of stimulated areas in task-related brain "activation" studies. These perturbations usually continue throughout the period of the…

Given that there are neural markers for the acquisition of a non-verbal skill, we review evidence of neural markers for the acquisition of vocabulary. Acquiring vocabulary is critical to learning one's native language and to learning other languages. Acquisition requires the ability to link an object concept (meaning) to sound. Is there a region…

The ubiquitous left-hemisphere advantage in visual word processing can be accounted for in different ways. Competing theories have been tested recently using cAsE-aLtErNaTiNg words to investigate boundary conditions for the typical effect. We briefly summarize this research and examine the disagreements and commonalities across the theoretical…

The hippocampal CA3 subregion is critical for rapidly encoding new memories, which suggests that neuronal computations are implemented in its circuitry that cannot be performed elsewhere in the hippocampus or in the neocortex. Recording studies show that CA3 cells are bound to a large degree to a spatial coordinate system, while CA1 cells can…

Comparative neuroanatomy suggests that the CA3 region of the mammalian hippocampus is directly homologous with the medio-dorsal pallium in birds and reptiles, with which it largely shares the basic organization of primitive cortex. Autoassociative memory models, which are generically applicable to cortical networks, then help assess how well CA3…