Following up on an earlier positron emission tomography (PET) experiment (Indefrey et al., 2001), we used a scene description paradigm to investigate whether a posterior inferior frontal region subserving syntactic encoding for speaking is also involved in syntactic parsing during listening. In the language production part of the experiment,…

An adult of above normal intelligence, BL, underwent left hemispherectomy at age five, and subsequently graduated from college and has been regularly employed. Using standardized neuropsychological instruments, previous extensive testing had revealed optimal performance for a hemispherectomized subject. To probe communicative abilities in greater…

The split fovea theory proposes that visual word recognition of centrally presented words is mediated by the splitting of the foveal image, with letters to the left of fixation being projected to the right hemisphere (RH) and letters to the right of fixation being projected to the left hemisphere (LH). Two lexical decision experiments aimed to…

Disfluencies include editing terms such as "uh" and "um" as well as repeats and revisions. Little is known about how disfluencies are processed, and there has been next to no research focused on the way that disfluencies affect structure-building operations during comprehension. We review major findings from both computational linguistics and…

In the present study, using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging, we investigated a group of participants on a grammaticality classification task after they had been exposed to well-formed consonant strings generated from an artificial regular grammar. We used an implicit acquisition paradigm in which the participants were exposed…

In the present paper, we develop and apply a technique, based on the logic of process dissociation, for obtaining numerical estimates of item and order information. Certain variables, such as phonological similarity, are widely believed to produce dissociative effects on item and order retention. However, such beliefs rest on the questionable…

Prosodic information in the speech signal carries information about linguistic structure as well as emotional content. Although children are known to use prosodic information from infancy onward to assist linguistic decoding, the brain correlates of this skill in childhood have not yet been the subject of study. Brain activation associated with…

Measures of electrical brain activity (event-related potentials, ERPs) have been useful in understanding language processing for several decades. Extant data suggest that the amplitude of the N400 component of the ERP is a general index of the ease or difficulty of retrieving stored conceptual knowledge associated with a word, which is dependent…

An eye-tracking experiment examined whether prosodic cues can affect the interpretation of grammatical functions in the absence of clear morphological information. German listeners were presented with scenes depicting three potential referents while hearing temporarily ambiguous SVO and OVS sentences. While case marking on the first noun phrase…

Plaut and Booth developed a distributed connectionist model of written word comprehension and evaluated it against empirical findings on individual and developmental differences in semantic priming in visual lexical decision. Borowsky and Besner raised a number of challenges for this model. First, the model was not shown to be capable of…

This paper offers evidence for the Isomorphic Mapping Hypothesis, which holds that individuals with agrammatic aphasia tend to have difficulty comprehending sentences in which the order of NPs is not aligned with the structure of the corresponding event. We begin by identifying a set of constructions in English and Korean for which the IMH makes…

The current study addresses the debate between so-called "structural" and "processing limitation" accounts of aphasia, i.e., whether language impairments reflect the "loss" of linguistic knowledge or its representations, or instead reflect a limitation in processing resources. Confrontation-naming task and category-judgment tasks were used to…

Studies conducted in recent years on oral and written language production show that the age at which words are learned is the main variable that influences lexical access in both hearing people and people who have suffered brain lesions. No studies have been done with deaf people and, since they use sign language in addition to oral language,…

Cross-linguistic studies provide a unique tool for the identification of universal processes in oral and written language, both in development and in breakdown ("Annual Review of psychology," 52, 369?396). Examining the differential strengths and weaknesses of children with dyslexia in contrasting orthographies can help illumine both the more…

Two experiments investigated the effect of kanji morphemic homophony on lexical decision and naming. Effects were examined from both the left-hand and right-hand positions of Japanese two-kanji compound words. The number of homophones affected the processing of compound words in the same way for both tasks. For left-hand kanji, fewer morphemic…