Broca's region in the dominant cerebral hemisphere is known to mediate the production of language but also contributes to comprehension. This region evolved only in humans and is constituted of Brodmann's areas 44 and 45 in the inferior frontal gyrus. There is, however, evidence that Broca's region overlaps, at least in part, with the ventral…

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 present interpretation-based processing--a theory of sentence processing that builds a syntactic and a semantic representation for a sentence and assigns an interpretation to the sentence as soon as possible. That interpretation can further participate in comprehension and in lexical processing and is vital for relating the sentence to the…

It has been shown that the processing of irregular past-tense forms is affected by phonological factors that are inherent in the relationship of the past-tense forms to other words in the lexicon (rhyming families of irregulars) or to their base forms (vowel dominance effects). This paper addresses more ephemeral phonological effects. In a…

Four experiments examined the nature of forgetting and the processing--storage relationship during performance on a prevalent working memory task, the reading span test. Using two different presentation paradigms, Experiments 1 and 2 replicated Towse, Hitch, and Hutton's (1998, 2000) finding that the Short-Final lists, which presented a long…

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…

The increase of multilingualism in both natural and formal contexts has provoked a number of studies which have concentrated on providing evidence of multilingual processing and finding out about the differences and similarities between second and third language learning. This paper deals with the use of metalanguage in multilingual students in an…

In three experiments we explored task-specific effects of syllable-frequency, following Perea and Carreiras' (1998) findings of a facilitative effect during naming and an inhibitory effect during lexical decision. In Experiment 1, an inhibitory effect of first syllable-frequency on articulation duration suggested a process-specific effect during…

Recently developed accounts of language comprehension propose that sentences are understood by constructing a perceptual simulation of the events being described. These simulations involve the re-activation of patterns of brain activation that were formed during the comprehender's interaction with the world. In two experiments we explored the…

Correct information unit (CIU) and main event analyses are quantitative measures for analyzing discourse of individuals with aphasia. Comparative data from healthy younger (YG) and older (OD) adults and an investigation of the influence of stimuli type would considerably extend the usefulness of such analyses. The objectives were (a) to compare…

This essay by Truscott and Sharwood-Smith is a valiant attempt with a laudable goal. It seeks to show how different perspectives and disciplines can capture what is happening in acquisition and notably in L2 acquisition. Nonetheless, I think that the results are much closer to an elaborated grammatical theory than an elaborated processing theory…

An important question in the study of language production is the nature of the semantic information that speakers use to create syntactic structures. A common answer to this question assumes that thematic roles help to mediate the mapping from messages to syntax. However, research using structural priming has suggested that the construction of…

In contrast to the many published accounts of the disfluent repetition of sounds at the beginnings of words, cases where it is predominantly the final parts of words that are repeated have been reported relatively rarely. With few exceptions, those studies that have been published have described either pre-school children or neurologically…

The lexical-semantic and syntactic abilities of a group of individuals with chronic nonthalamic subcortical (NS) lesions following stroke (n=6) were investigated using the Western Aphasia Battery (WAB) picture description task [Kertesz, A. (1982). "The Western aphasia battery." New York: Grune and Stratton] and compared with those of a…

Two experiments investigated sensory/motor-based functional knowledge of man-made objects: manipulation features associated with the actual usage of objects. In Experiment 1, a series of prime-target pairs was presented auditorily, and participants were asked to make a lexical decision on the target word. Participants made a significantly faster…