Showing papers in "Brain and Language in 2013"

TL;DR: A growing body of evidence suggests that there are at least two distinct Dorsal routes in the human brain, referred to as the "Grasp" and "Use" systems.

TL;DR: The recently acknowledged role of the cerebellum in linguistic and related cognitive and behavioral-affective functions is reviewed and the current hypotheses dealing with the presumed neurobiological mechanisms underlying the linguistic, cognitive and affective modulatory role of this organ are reviewed.

TL;DR: The combination of functional responses from cortex and anatomical measures in the white matter provides an overview of how the written word is encoded and communicated along the ventral occipital-temporal circuitry for seeing words.

TL;DR: A new dorsal-ventral stream framework for language comprehension which unifies basic neurobiological assumptions with a cross-linguistic neurocognitive sentence comprehension model and is supported by a range of existing empirical findings and helps to resolve a number of theoretical and empirical puzzles within the existing dorsal- ventral streams literature.

TL;DR: Functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to assess neural activation as participants learned to segment continuous streams of speech containing syllable sequences varying in their transitional probabilities, showing significant activity in the pars opercularis and pars triangularis regions of the left inferior frontal gyrus.

TL;DR: It is suggested that the trait of vocal learning may not be dichotomous but encompass a broad spectrum of behavioral and neural traits the authors call the continuum hypothesis, and that mice possess some of the traits associated with a capacity for limited vocal learning.

TL;DR: It is proposed that once all other factors, including imageability and context availability are controlled, abstract words may trigger a larger number of superficial linguistic associations that can be quickly used for response decisions.

TL;DR: The current review examines the anatomical, temporal, and behavioral evidence regarding three potential models of dual stream interaction: (1) computations along the two pathways proceed independently and in parallel, reintegrating within shared target brain regions; (2) processing along the separate pathways is modulated by the existence of recurrent feedback loops; and (3) information is transferred directly between the two pathway at multiple stages and locations along their trajectories.

TL;DR: A maturational primacy of the ventral connection in the language network associating the temporal areas to the inferior frontal gyrus during early development is revealed, which is already in place at birth.

TL;DR: It is concluded that each of the two abnormality types can cause stuttering moments, probably by affecting the same BG-thalamus-vPMC circuit.

TL;DR: The results indicate that multilinguals have increased activation in the left putamen for a non-native language, but only if they are not highly proficient in that language, and found increased grey matter density in theleft putamen of mult bilinguals compared to monolinguals, highlighting that the multilingual brain handles a complex articulatory repertoire by inducing structural plasticity in the right putamen.

TL;DR: In both tasks, PD patients' performance was selectively impaired for action verbs (relative to controls), indicating that the motor system plays a more central role in the processing of action verbs than in theprocessing of abstract verbs, arguing for a causal role of sensory-motor systems in semantic processing.

TL;DR: Brain-behavior analyses were employed to explore the relationship between performance on tasks measuring phonological awareness, pseudoword decoding, and rapid auditory processing and brain organization for print and speech in beginning readers and Implications for brain-based models of literacy acquisition are discussed.

TL;DR: Tapping performance related to reading, attention, and backward masking, which motivates future research investigating whether beat synchronization training can improve not only reading ability, but potentially executive function and auditory processing as well.

TL;DR: Action perception theory (APT) offers neurobiological mechanisms for "Embodied" referential, affective and action semantics along with "disembodied" mechanisms of semantic abstraction, generalization and symbol combination, which draw upon multimodal brain systems.

TL;DR: Using magnetoencephalography (MEG), this study found that brain activity was modulated by whether or not a specific noun could be predicted, given a picture prime, which suggests that predictive language processing recruits a top-down network where predicted words are activated at different levels of representation.

TL;DR: This paper identified clusters in which BOLD activity was correlated with individual post-scan beauty ratings, indicating that some spontaneous aesthetic evaluation takes place during reading, even if not required by the task.

TL;DR: Auditory word-form recognition was originally proposed by Wernicke to occur within left superior temporal gyrus (STG), later further specified to be in posterior STG, and may be better construed as two cortical modules, an auditory word- form area (AWFA) in the auditory ventral stream and an "inner speech area" inThe auditory dorsal stream.

TL;DR: It is concluded that four related corticothalamic and/or thalamocortical mechanisms impact language processing and the relationship and interaction of these mechanisms are discussed and integrated with thalamic aphasia and neuroimaging data into a theory ofThalamic functions in language.

TL;DR: Patients with lvPPA develop single word level processing deficits over time and patterns of cell loss in lVPPA remain asymmetrical over time.

TL;DR: The behavioural results showed that phonetic coding ability and empathy, but not phonological working memory, predict L2 pronunciation aptitude in advanced learners, and functional neuroimaging revealed this behavioural trait to be correlated with hemodynamic responses of the cerebral network of speech motor control and auditory-perceptual areas.

TL;DR: A review of the descriptions of language-related fiber anatomy in the human and monkey brain was performed and there can be no doubt that dorsal and ventral language streams have a clear correlation in the structure of white matter tracts.

TL;DR: Two cases are presented, one with semantic variant of PPA and the other with logopenic PPA, each of whom underwent treatment that was unique in its focus on training self-cueing strategies to engage residual language skills, and showed maintenance of gains as well as generalization to untrained lexical items.

TL;DR: The intricate dialogue of distinct thalamic nuclei with the basal ganglia, cerebellum, and specific dorsolateral prefrontal and premotor cortices associated with language, suggests synergistic roles in the complex but seemingly effortless sequential transformation of cognitive operations for speech production in humans.

TL;DR: This review will describe the functional organization of the thalamus as it relates to processing acoustic features important for speech perception, focusing on thalamic nuclei that relate to auditory representations of language sounds.

TL;DR: The elicitation of the EPN seems to be based on semantic processes, with emotional valence being accessed before other semantic aspects such as concreteness of verbs, which occurred after the start of main effects of emotion.

TL;DR: DT MRI is used to assess the topography of WM microstructural damage along dorsal and ventral language pathways and corpus callosum in patients with NFV and SV and shows that the two PPA variants share an overlapping pattern of dorsal and Ventral pathway abnormalities.

TL;DR: It is suggested that the thalamus may be involved in processes that involve manipulations of lexical information, but the need for more systematic study of theThalamic activation using language tasks is pointed to.

TL;DR: The trend suggests that pre-therapy integration of the default-mode network may predict therapy outcomes, and functional connectivity allows a better understanding of the impact of semantic feature analysis in aphasia.

TL;DR: It is concluded that beat gestures are integrated with speech early on in time and modulate sensory/phonological levels of processing and support the possible role of beats as a highlighter, helping the listener to direct the focus of attention to important information and modulates the parsing of the speech stream.