Prosody or speech melody subserves linguistic (e.g., question intonation) and emotional functions in speech communication. Findings from lesion studies and imaging experiments suggest that, depending on function or acoustic stimulus structure, prosodic speech components are differentially processed in the right and left hemispheres. This direct…

Twenty years ago, Vietnam's closed-door policy meant its students were restricted to the former Soviet-bloc countries. Today they study all over the world--about 6,000 are in the United States alone. In many cases, their tuition and living expenses are paid by foreign governments and private charitable organizations. Fulbright, the Ford…

Previous research suggests that the left hemisphere (LH) focuses on strongly related word meanings; the right hemisphere (RH) may contribute uniquely to the processing of lexical ambiguity by activating and maintaining a wide range of meanings, including subordinate meanings. The present study used the word-lists false memory paradigm [Roediger,…

The Apolipoprotein (ApoE) [epsilon]4 allele is a major genetic risk factor of Alzheimer's disease, and may affect the production of amyloid beta (A[beta][subscript 1-42]). Recently, we have shown that [beta]-secretase (BACE 1) activity can be reliably detected within the brain and human CSF. Here, we have examined an association between the ApoE…

This "Compendium" is a comprehensive reference manual containing an extensive selection of instruments developed to measure signs and symptoms commonly encountered in neurological conditions, both progressive and non-progressive. It provides a repository of established instruments, as well as newly-developed scales, and covers all aspects of the…

Lave and Wenger have greatly influenced existing views of learning and teaching, but relatively little has been written about the implications for the understanding of teacher behavior and teacher learning, and for the pedagogy of teacher education. Based on their work, a three-level model of learning is used to analyze the friction between…

Background: Antipsychotic medications have been used extensively to treat aggressive behaviours in persons with intellectual disabilities (ID) when the main psychiatric diagnoses given to them in the past were schizophrenia, childhood psychoses and ID with behaviour problems. Today, antipsychotics are still estimated to comprise 30-50% of all the…

This article reports a gender replication study of the P. T. Fox et a. (2000) performance correlation analysis of neural systems that distinguish between normal and stuttered speech in adult males. Positron-emission tomographic (PET) images of cerebral blood flow (CBF) were correlated with speech behavior scores obtained during PET imaging for 10…

Individuals differ in the number of corpus callosum (CC) nerve fibers interconnecting their cerebral hemispheres by about threefold. Early reports suggested that males had smaller CCs than females. This was often interpreted to support the concept that the male brain is more "lateralized" or "specialized," thus accounting for presumed male…

This article begins a regular series on how brain research can help us understand young people and ourselves as well. The intent is to alert the reader to important information from recent research on the brain. This initial installment explores the concept of the triune brain, a term coined by neuroscientist Paul MacLean. This refers to three…

The understanding of fundamental neurological processes that enables the brain to analyze good learning produces physical changes in brain. The use of several regions of brain in the learning process and problem solving techniques are discussed.

Researchers using lateralized stimuli have suggested that the left hemisphere is sensitive to sentence-level context, whereas the right hemisphere (RH) primarily processes word-level meaning. The authors investigated this message-blind RH model by measuring associative priming with event-related brain potentials (ERPs). For word pairs in…

The burgeoning interest over recent decades about the human brain, and possible implications for education, has, perhaps not surprisingly, fostered a suite of urban myths about brain functioning. The prize for the barmiest goes to the one about using only 10% of the brain, but there are plenty more that deserve dishonourable mention. The most…

The structure of the brain and the nature of evolution suggest that, despite its uniqueness, language likely depends on brain systems that also subserve other functions. The declarative/procedural (DP) model claims that the mental lexicon of memorized word-specific knowledge depends on the largely temporal-lobe substrates of declarative memory,…

Sex differences in cognition are consistently reported, men excelling in most visuospatial tasks and women in certain verbal tasks. It has been hypothesized that these sex differences in cognition results from a more bilateral pattern of language representation in women than in men. This bilateral pattern of language representation in women is…