Human communicational interaction can be mediated by a host of expressive means from words in a natural language to gestures and material symbols. Given the proper contextual setting even an everyday object can gain a mediating function in a communicational situation. In this study we used event-related fMRI to study the brain activity caused by…

In 3 picture-word experiments, the authors explored the activation of 2 grammatical features in Czech during lexical access: declensional class of nouns and conjugational class of verbs. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated congruency effects of declensional and conjugational class, respectively. Picture naming times were reliably longer if the…

In a world that is becoming more multilingual, bilingual aphasia is a clinical problem with a major clinical impact. However, at present we lack causal explanations of the many features of recovery patterns and there is no consensus about the language in which the patient should receive speech therapy. Further advance requires an understanding of…

The brain basis of bilinguals' ability to use two languages at the same time has been a hotly debated topic. On the one hand, behavioral research has suggested that bilingual dual language use involves complex and highly principled linguistic processes. On the other hand, brain-imaging research has revealed that bilingual language switching…

A central issue in cognitive neuroscience today concerns how distributed neural networks in the brain that are used in language learning and processing can be involved in non-linguistic cognitive sequence learning. This issue is informed by a wealth of functional neurophysiology studies of sentence comprehension, along with a number of recent…

This study aimed to determine the relative processing cost associated with comprehension of an unfamiliar native accent under adverse listening conditions. Two sentence verification experiments were conducted in which listeners heard sentences at various signal-to-noise ratios. In Experiment 1, these sentences were spoken in a familiar or an…

To explore the temporal sequence of, and the relationship between, the left and right hemispheres (LH and RH) during semantic memory (SM) processing we identified the neural networks involved in the performance of functional MRI semantic object retrieval task (SORT) using group independent component analysis (ICA) in 47 healthy individuals. SORT…

Theories of confidence judgments have embraced the role random error plays in influencing responses. An important next step is to identify the source(s) of these random effects. To do so, we used the stochastic judgment model (SJM) to distinguish the contribution of encoding and retrieval processes. In particular, we investigated whether dividing…

Spatial terms such as "right" are potentially ambiguous because they can refer to different regions of space when defined by competing reference frames (e.g., my "right" within a relative reference frame versus an object's "right" within an intrinsic reference frame). In such situations, previous research has suggested that multiple reference…

In the present study we analyzed the processing of grammatically anomalous sentences like "*The famous dancer were nervously preparing herself/themselves to face the crowd.", which contains two anomalies, one early and one late. We investigated how processing of the later anomaly (at the pronoun "herself" or…

The purpose of this article is to propose a view of language processing, and particularly the role of aspect therein, from a mental-simulation perspective. I argue that situation model theories can account for the flow between and interconnectedness of event representations but that mental simulation theories are needed to account for the internal…

Letter identities and number identities are usually thought to imply different cortical mechanisms. Specifically, the left fusiform gyrus responds more to letters than to digits (T. A. Polk et al., 2002). However, a widely circulated statement on the internet illustrates that it is possible to use numbers (leet digits) as parts of words, 4ND TH3…

Until recently, the history of debates about language and thought has been a history of thinking of language in the singular. The purpose of this volume is to reverse this trend and to begin unlocking the mysteries surrounding thinking and speaking in bi- and multilingual speakers. If languages influence the way we think, what happens to those who…

In bilingual language processing, the parallel activation hypothesis suggests that bilinguals activate their two languages simultaneously during language processing. Support for the parallel activation mainly comes from studies of lexical (word-form) processing, with relatively less attention to phonological (sound) processing. According to…

Could a second language (L2) influence how bilinguals process their native language (L1)? The work described in this dissertation examined this issue focusing on the way bilinguals interpret the meanings of words. Capitalizing on the prevalence of words that can be translated in more than one way across languages (i.e., "translation ambiguity,"…