This introductory article introduces papers that present examples of neuroimaging applications in the field of communication sciences and disorders. It notes that neuroimaging studies were usually an outgrowth of earlier behavioral research or clinical observations with knowledge of the disorder's behavioral characteristic critical to development…

Discussion of how functional neuroimaging has been applied to the study of speech production first reviews neuroimaging methods and limitations, then describes two approaches to study of the relevant speech areas: comparison across different language production tasks and comparison of effects of different stimuli within a single task. Examples…

This introductory article briefly describes each of the following eight articles in this special issue on the neurology and genetics of learning related disorders. It notes the greater appreciation of learning disability as a set of complex disorders with broad and intricate neurological bases and of the large individual differences in how these…

This study examined event-related potentials (ERPs) to synthetic consonant-vowel syllables from 26 newborns with familial risk for dyslexia and 23 control infants participating in a longitudinal study of dyslexia. Results indicated that the cortical electric activation evoked by speech elements differed between children with and without risk for…

Real-time language comprehension is a principal cognitive ability and thereby relates to central properties of the human cognitive architecture. Yet how do the presumably universal cognitive and neural substrates of language processing relate to the astounding diversity of human languages (over 5,000)? The authors present a neurocognitive model of…

One of the most exciting developments to emerge from the field in the past 20 years is the increasing attention to neurobiological responses to violence and trauma exposure. Although researchers have yet to identify a consensual pattern of neurobiological response to violence and trauma exposure, it does appear that some type of alteration in the…

During the earliest stages of resistance exercise training, initial muscular strength gains occur too rapidly to be explained solely by muscle-based mechanisms. However, increases in surface-based EMG amplitude as well as motor unit discharge rate provide some insight to the existence of neural mechanisms in the earliest phases of resistance…

Numerous brain areas work in concert to subserve memory, with distinct memory functions relying differentially on distinct brain areas. For example, semantic memory relies heavily on posterior cortical regions, episodic memory on hippocampal regions, and working memory on prefrontal cortical regions. This article reviews relevant findings from…

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) scientists have developed a new dye that could offer noninvasive early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease, a discovery that could aid in monitoring the progression of the disease and in studying the efficacy of new treatments to stop it. The work is published in Angewandte Chemie. Today, doctors can only…

For 25 years now, there has been a serious attempt to get at the fundamental cause(s) of dyslexia in our laboratory. A great deal of research has been carried out on the psychological and brain underpinnings of the linguistic dysfunctions seen in dyslexia, but attempts to get at its cause have been limited. Initially, observations were made on the…

Activation studies in patients with aphasia due to stroke or tumours in the dominant hemisphere have revealed effects of disinhibition in ipsilateral perilesional and in contralateral homotopic cortical regions, referred to as collateral and transcallosal disinhibition. These findings were supported by studies with selective disturbance of…

Nerve conduction velocity (NCV) and efficiency of synaptic transmission are two possible biological mechanisms that may underpin intelligence. Direct assessments of NCV, without synaptic transmission, show few substantial or reliable correlations with cognitive abilities ["Intelligence" 16 (1992) 273]. We therefore assessed the latencies…

The attentional blink refers to the transient impairment in perceiving the 2nd of 2 targets presented in close temporal proximity. In this article, the authors propose a neurobiological mechanism for this effect. The authors extend a recently developed computational model of the potentiating influence of the locus coeruleus-norepinephrine system…

The forebrain cholinergic neurons are localized in the nucleus basalis magnocellularis (NBM), the major source of cholinergic innervation to the neocortex and to the amygdala, and in the medium septum-banda diagonalis complex, which provides cholinergic inputs to the hippocampus (Mesulam et al. 1983; Woolf et al. 1984; Nicoll 1985). Basic and…

We previously reported that five repeated pulses of 5-HT lead to down-regulation of the TM-apCAM isoform at the surface of "Aplysia" sensory neurons (SNs). We here examined whether apCAM down-regulation is required for 5-HT-induced long-term facilitation. We also analyzed the role of the cytoplasmic and extracellular domains by overexpressing…