This paper reports a conjunction analysis between semantic relatedness judgment and semantic associate generation of Chinese nouns and verbs with concrete or abstract meanings. The results revealed a verb-specific task-independent region in LpSTG&MTG, and task-dependent activation in a left frontal region in semantic judgment and the left SMG in…

Recent neurobiological studies revealed evidence for lexical representations that are not specified for the coronal place of articulation (PLACE; Friedrich, Eulitz, & Lahiri, 2006; Friedrich, Lahiri, & Eulitz, 2008). Here we tested when these types of underspecified representations influence neuronal speech recognition. In a unimodal…

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) can demonstrate hypersensitivity to sounds as well as a lack of awareness of them. Several functional imaging studies have suggested an abnormal response in the auditory cortex of such subjects, but it is not known whether these subjects have dysfunction in the auditory cortex or are simply not…

Within the framework of Friederici's (2002) neurocognitive model of sentence processing, the early left anterior negativity (ELAN) in event-related potentials (ERPs) has been claimed to be a brain marker of syntactic first-pass parsing. As ELAN components seem to be exclusively elicited by word category violations (phrase structure violations),…

Discourse cohesion and coherence give communication its continuity providing the grammatical and lexical links that hold an utterance or text together and give it meaning. Researchers often link cohesion and coherence deficits to the frontal lobes by drawing attention to frontal lobe dysfunction in populations where discourse cohesion and…

Previous studies suggest that whereas the left hemisphere (LH) is involved in fine semantic processing, the right hemisphere (RH) is uniquely engaged in coarse semantic coding including the comprehension of distinct types of language such as figurative language, lexical ambiguity and verbal humor (e.g., and ). The present study examined the…

Multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA), or "decoding", of fMRI activity has gained popularity in the neuroimaging community in recent years. MVPA differs from standard fMRI analyses by focusing on whether information relating to specific stimuli is encoded in patterns of activity across multiple voxels. If a stimulus can be predicted, or decoded,…

The neural mechanisms that underlie familiarity memory have been extensively investigated, but a consensus understanding remains elusive. Behavioral evidence suggests that familiarity sometimes shares sources with instances of implicit memory known as priming, in that the same increases in processing fluency that give rise to priming can engender…

Upon stimulation, real time maps of cortical hemodynamic responses can be obtained by non-invasive functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) which measures changes in oxygenated and deoxygenated hemoglobin after positioning multiple sources and detectors over the human scalp. The current commercially available transportable fNIRS systems have…

Songbirds and humans share many parallels in vocal learning and auditory sequence processing. However, the two groups differ notably in their abilities to recognize acoustic sequences shifted in absolute pitch (pitch height). Whereas humans maintain accurate recognition of words or melodies over large pitch height changes, songbirds are…

Decision making, a complex mental activity underlying the act of choosing from among the alternatives in attaining a goal constitutes the core component of planning, a higher order cognitive process as per the PASS theory of intelligence. An attempt, therefore, has been made in the present study to examine the development of planning behaviour in…

Adults need certain capabilities to get and keep a job, provide responsive care for children, manage a household, and contribute productively to the community. When these skills have not developed as they should, or are compromised by the stresses of poverty or other ongoing adversity, our communities pay the price. But where do these capabilities…

This book presents original, empirical data from quantitative and qualitative research studies in the field of language learning aptitude, ability, and individual differences. It does so from the perspectives of Second Language Acquisition, psychology, neuroscience and sociolinguistics. All studies included in the book use a similar and uniform…

Students start to memorize arithmetic facts from early elementary school mathematics activities. Their fluency or lack of fluency with these facts could affect their efforts as they carry out mental calculations as adults. This study investigated participants' levels of brain activation and possible reasons for these levels as they solved…

Recent neuroimaging evidence has suggested that expert dancers have stronger activation than novices in areas of parietal cortex while watching dance. The role of parietal cortex in the processing of spatial information could suggest that expert dancers are more attuned than novice dancers to spatial cues while watching dance. Instead of focusing…