The present study characterizes the neural correlates of noun and verb imageability and addresses the question of whether components of the neural network supporting word recognition can be separately modified by variations in grammatical class and imageability. We examined the effect of imageability on BOLD signal during single-word comprehension…

According to the Royal National Institute for the Deaf, between eight and nine million people suffer from some form of deafness or loss of hearing. Modern technology, however, together with the work of audiologists such as Karen Shepherd, enables many adults and children to recover near-normal levels of hearing, even when they have suffered some…

Background: The current study examined the neuro-cognitive network of visual word rhyming judgment in 14 children with dyslexia and 14 age-matched control children (8- to 14-year-olds) using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Methods: In order to manipulate the difficulty of mapping orthography to phonology, we used conflicting and…

While inductive and deductive reasoning are considered distinct logical and psychological processes, little is known about their respective neural basis. To address this issue we scanned 16 subjects with fMRI, using an event-related design, while they engaged in inductive and deductive reasoning tasks. Both types of reasoning were characterized by…

Patients with corticobasal degeneration (CBD) appear to have impaired number knowledge. We examined the nature of their number deficit while we tested the hypothesis that comprehension of larger numbers depends in part on verbal mediation. We evaluated magnitude judgments and performance on number conservation measures rooted in Piagetian theory…

Tracking the functional development of specific regions of the prefrontal cortex in children using event-related potentials (ERPs) is challenging for both technical and conceptual reasons. In this paper we outline our strategy for studying frontal lobe development and present preliminary results from children aged 7-17 years and young adults using…

It is commonly accepted that phonology is the exclusive domain of the left hemisphere. However, this pattern of lateralization, which posits a right visual field advantage, has been questioned by several studies. In fact, certain factors such as characteristics of the stimuli and subjects' handedness can modulate the right visual field advantage.…

It has been suggested that neglect patients misrepresent the metric spatial relations along the horizontal axis (anisometry). The ''fabric'' of their internal spatial medium would be distorted in such a way that physically equal distances appear relatively shorter on the contralesional side (canonical anisometry). The case of GL, a 76-year-old…

Two experiments used both irrelevant speech and tones in order to assess the effect of manipulating the spatial location of irrelevant sound. Previous research in this area had produced inconclusive results (e.g., Colle, 1980). The current study demonstrated a novel finding, that sound presented to the left ear produces the greatest level of…

The present study was conducted to examine hemispheric division of labor in the initial processing and error monitoring in tasks for which hemispheric specialization exists. We used lexical decision as a left hemisphere task and bargraph judgment as a right hemisphere task, and manipulated cognitive load. Participants had to respond to one of two…

The aim of the study was to test for possible functional cerebral asymmetry in processing one segment of linguistic prosody, namely word stress, in Croatian. The test material consisted of eight tokens of the word "pas" under a falling accent, varying only in vowel duration between 119 and 185ms, attached to the end of a frame sentence. The…

Based on clinical and functional imaging data, the left anterior insula has been assumed to support prearticulatory functions of speech motor control such as the ''programming'' of vocal tract gestures. In order to further elucidate this model, a recent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study of our group (Riecker, Ackermann,…

Mirror neurons, first described in the rostral part of monkey ventral premotor cortex (area F5), discharge both when the animal performs a goal-directed hand action and when it observes another individual performing the same or a similar action. More recently, in the same area mirror neurons responding to the observation of mouth actions have been…

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…