To determine the areas involved in reorganization of language to the right hemisphere after early left hemisphere injury, we compared fMRI activation patterns during four production and comprehension tasks in post-surgical epilepsy patients with either left (LH) or right hemisphere (RH) speech dominance (determined by Wada testing) and healthy…

Many differences in brain activity have been reported between persons who stutter (PWS) and typically fluent controls during oral reading tasks. An earlier meta-analysis of imaging studies identified stutter-related regions, but recent studies report less agreement with those regions. A PET study on adult dextral PWS (n = 18) and matched fluent…

Recent evidence suggests that blindness enables visual circuits to contribute to language processing. We examined whether this dramatic functional plasticity has a sensitive period. BOLD fMRI signal was measured in congenitally blind, late blind (blindness onset 9-years-old or later) and sighted participants while they performed a sentence…

The immediate and long-term neural correlates of linguistic processing deficits reported following paediatric and adolescent traumatic brain injury (TBI) are poorly understood. Therefore, the current research investigated event-related potentials (ERPs) elicited during a semantic picture-word priming experiment in two groups of highly functioning…

We assessed the relationship between brain structure and function in 10 individuals with specific language impairment (SLI), compared to six unaffected siblings, and 16 unrelated control participants with typical language. Voxel-based morphometry indicated that grey matter in the SLI group, relative to controls, was increased in the left inferior…

We examined the semantic impairment for natural kinds in patients with probable Alzheimer's disease (AD) and semantic dementia (SD) using an inductive reasoning paradigm. To learn about the relationships between natural kind exemplars and how these are distinguished from manufactured artifacts, subjects judged the strength of arguments such as…

Objective: Functional MRI was used to determine differences in patterns of cortical activation between children who suffered perinatal left middle cerebral artery (MCA) stroke and healthy children performing a silent verb generation task. Methods: Ten children with prior perinatal left MCA stroke (age 6-16 years) and ten healthy age matched…

Idiom comprehension in 15 aphasic patients was assessed with three tasks: a sentence-to-picture matching task, a sentence-to-word matching task and an oral definition task. The results of all three tasks showed that the idiom comprehension in aphasic patients was impaired compared to that of the control group, and was significantly affected by the…

Objective: Functional MRI was used to determine differences in patterns of cortical activation between children who suffered perinatal left middle cerebral artery (MCA) stroke and healthy children performing a silent verb generation task. Methods: Ten children with prior perinatal left MCA stroke (age 6-16 years) and ten healthy age matched…

Patients with conduction aphasia have been characterized as having a short-term memory deficit that leads to relative difficulty on span and repetition tasks. It has also been observed that these same patients often get the gist of what is said to them, even if they are unable to repeat the information verbatim. To study this phenomenon…

This paper investigates stress assignment in Dutch aphasic patients in non-word repetition, as well as in real-word and non-word reading. Performance on the non-word reading task was similar for the aphasic patients and the control group, as mainly regular stress was assigned to the targets. However, there were group differences on the real-word…

Participants report briefly-presented words more accurately when two copies are presented, one in the left visual field (LVF) and another in the right visual field (RVF), than when only a single copy is presented. This effect is known as the "redundant bilateral advantage" and has been interpreted as evidence for interhemispheric cooperation. We…

Recent neuropsychological evidence, supporting a strong version of Whorfian principles of linguistic relativity, has reinvigorated debate about the role of language in colour categorisation. This paper questions the methodology used in this research and uses a novel approach to examine the unique contribution of language to categorisation…

Processing abilities in aphasia, and the nature of processing breakdowns, were the focuses of this investigation. Individuals with either fluent or nonfluent aphasia, plus a control group, participated in a cross-modal lexical priming task designed to elicit priming effects when activation of inference interpretations occurred. Comprehension of…

This study presents results from sentence-completion and grammaticality-judgement tasks with seven German-speaking agrammatic aphasics and seven age-matched control subjects examining verb finiteness marking and verb-second (V2) placement. The patients were found to be selectively impaired in tense marking in the face of preserved mood and…