Angela D Friederici

..Thus, acquisition of syntax requires the maturation of fiber bundles connecting the classical language-relevant brain regions...

..Based on previous research in German we expected an N400-P600 biphasic ERP response with specific modulations depending on the violated case and whether the listeners were native or non-native...

..This differentiation is exemplified in the domain of language, but is possibly applicable to non-language domains...

..Studies with patients suffering from lesions in the corpus callosum reveal that the posterior portion of this structure plays a crucial role in the interaction of syntactic and prosodic information during language processing...

..Moreover, the neurophysiological indices for non-local dependency relations vary as a function of the morphological richness of the language...

..Discontinuities are observed in children with language impairment. Here, the observed functional abnormalities are accompanied by structural abnormalities in inferior frontal and temporal brain regions...

..The similarities between the brain response patterns observed in children and adults support the view that language develops in a continuous manner...

..Given the far-reaching relevance of this conclusion, the question arises as to whether the distinction between these two types of grammars finds its reflection in different neural systems within the human brain...

..It is therefore considered to be crucial for the evolution of human language, which is characterized by the ability to process syntactically complex sentences...

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..Tractography data revealing differential structural connectivity signatures for these two brain areas provide additional evidence for a segregation of two areas in the left inferior frontal cortex...

..These data indicate language-specific neural representations of word forms in the infant brain as early as 4 months of age...

..These data indicate a functional reorganization of the neural network underlying language development towards a system that allows a close interplay between frontal and temporal regions within the left hemisphere...

..The data demonstrate that different brain regions in the prefrontal cortex support distinct mechanisms in the mapping from a linguistic form onto meaning, thereby separating ungrammaticality from linguistic complexity...

..As the grammatical dependencies are realized by phonologically distinct syllables the present data most likely reflect phonologically based implicit learning mechanisms which can serve as a precursor to later grammar learning...

..The present data provide evidence for a strong influence of testosterone on language function and lateralization already present during the first weeks of life...

..The neural generators of these components are discussed as well, both in the context of available brain imaging data and ERPs from lesion patient studies...

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..Our data demonstrate that the mid-to-anterior STS activation is associated with increasing speech intelligibility, while the mid-to-posterior STG/STS is more sensitive to syntactic information within the speech...

..The combined results provide evidence that L1 and L2 speakers rely on the same cortical network to process language, although with a higher level of activation in some regions for L2 processing...

..In a test phase applied at least 1 day later, the N400 differentiated between trained congruous and incongruous pairings, which indicates that this newly established referential knowledge has been consolidated in memory...

..This finding supports serial models of sentence processing that postulate an initial autonomous stage of phrase structure building and a late stage of interaction...

..Finally, it appears that brain areas which subserve speech (frontal operculum) and premotor functions (Rolandic operculum) coincidently support the processing of intonation contour in spoken sentence comprehension...

..Our results indicate that both music and language can prime the meaning of a word, and that music can, as language, determine physiological indices of semantic processing...

..They further allow to specify the nature of the representational differences, namely that early learned words are represented in the brain in a more sensory manner than late learned words...

..These regions included the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), superior temporal gyrus (STG), and subcortical structures of the basal ganglia...

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..Importantly, the findings suggest that Broca's area is also engaged in hierarchical sequencing in domains other than language...

..This finding might support the notion of a common origin of music and language in the human brain, and concurs with findings that demonstrate the importance of musical features of speech for the acquisition of language...

..The differences in prosodic processing may in turn hamper the development of syntactic processing skills as indicated by the absence of the syntax-related early left anterior negativity...

..These data provide evidence for a strong interrelation between the language and the music processing system, thereby setting the ground for possible effects of musical training in SLI therapy...

..We further demonstrate that the findings cannot be explained by mere acoustic feature processing, but rather point towards a holistic mapping of the incoming voice signal onto long-term representations in the auditory memory...

..These findings are discussed in the light of differences between the German and the English intonation systems...

..These data provide direct evidence for a functional neuroanatomical basis for two linguistically motivated reanalysis processes during sentence comprehension...

..These results suggest that prosodic phrase processing, as indicated by the CPS, is established only later during children's development, pointing to a close interaction of prosody and syntax acquisition...

..The present findings suggest that the basal ganglia primarily do not support early automatic syntactic processes during comprehension but rather support processes of syntactic integration...

..The appearance of the early negativity indicates that the neural mechanisms of syntactic parsing are present, in principle, during early language development...

..Our results are in line with previous studies localizing the sMMN to morphosyntactic violations and are furthermore compatible with the sensory hypothesis of closed-class morphology based syntactic processes...

..Moreover, they demonstrate that these subjects can use their inhibition in a more flexible manner than low-span subjects. The effects that these processing differences have on the efficiency of language parsing are discussed...

..The authors interpret this early positivity as a general marker of focus integration, a process that appears to briefly supersede sentence-internal requirements...

..e. a Mismatch Negativity (MMN), to the trochaic stress pattern. This amplitude difference indicates impaired prosodic processing of word stress during early development and may thus be taken as an early marker of risk for SLI...

..Spatio-temporal differences in that effect, thus, indicate changes in the organization of brain activity correlated with the child's behavioral development...

..The results also demonstrated marked right hemispheric predominance, suggesting that hand expression is processed in a manner similar to that in which social signs, such as facial expressions, are processed...

..Participants were presented four alternating learning and testing phases. During learning phases only correct sentences were presented while during testing phases 50 percent of the sentences contained a grammatical violation...

..The results indicate that variability in expressive language development has precursors in infants' ERP correlates of word stress processing...

..This positivity varied as a function of the violation position in PSG, but not in FSG. These findings suggest that the late positivity could reflect difficulty of integration in PSG sequences...

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..Semantically incorrect words that do not fit into the context result in longer integration times...

..Our results suggest that lexical, syntactic and semantic features of verbal stimuli interact in a complex fashion during language comprehension...

..The results indicate that L2 learners show similar, though slower, homonym processing mechanisms to those of native speakers of a language, and that both groups can achieve disambiguation based on semantic context...

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..Only the P350 effect could be replicated across different fragment lengths. Therefore, the P350 is discussed as a correlate of lexical identification in a modality-independent mental lexicon...

..The observed interaction between syntactic and prosodic information during auditory sentence comprehension is attributed to dynamic interactions between the two hemispheres...

..In sum, the present findings provide strong evidence that prosodic information is a good ''predictor'' of upcoming information during the auditory processing of German sentences...

..The current findings demonstrate that very early in development, the human brain detects emotionally loaded words and shows differential attentional responses depending on their emotional valence...

..Thus, the language networks for semantic and syntactic processes are not yet specialized similarly to adults in the developing brain...

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..Thus, social cues have an impact on how words are learned and represented in a child's mental lexicon...

..The results indicate that the motor act and the function of the objects are derived by two at least partially different subprocesses and become integrated into a common representation of the observed action...

..This challenges the idea that there are fundamental differences in language processing in the brain between natives and late L2 learners...

..Hence, the present findings are consistent with the notion that Broca's area supports the processing of syntax in a rather domain-general way...

..The finding that a CPS was identified in all sentence types in correlation to the perception of their major intonational boundaries clearly indicates that this effect is driven purely by prosody...

..Our findings indicate that even children at this early age are sensitive to syntactic errors in the form of phrase structure violations...

..Both bottom-up (style properties of the music) and top-down (acculturation of the subjects) information interacted during this early processing stage...

..These data indicate that both semantic and syntactic processes are supported by a temporo-frontal network with distinct areas specialized for semantic and syntactic processes...

..The possible functional relation of the N400 neural mechanisms and the infant's word learning ability is discussed...

..The combined data moreover suggest an interaction between prosody and syntax in a later time window during sentence comprehension...

..Generally, by identifying distinct functional regions in the right STG, our study supports the notion of a fundamental role of the right hemisphere in spoken language comprehension...

..The prosodic structure (i.e., the duration) of the first morphemes of compound words appears to be a determining factor for activation of the decompositional route...

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..A delay in latency of the infant closure positive shift, however, suggests that children's exploitation of prosodic boundaries for the segmentation of the speech stream is still developing...

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..The results suggest that both context-driven expectancy (top-down) and stimulus-driven processes (bottom-up) are utilized in word processing and contribute to the overall N400 response...

..This suggests the immediate influence of phrasal prosody during the initial parsing stage in speech processing...

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..The present ERP results support the earlier behavioral research in showing that phonemic restoration is not a bottom-up phenomenon but rather reflects a top-down repair process...

..Participants were "nonmusicians"; results thus support the hypothesis that nonmusicians have a sophisticated (implicit) knowledge about musical regularities...

..Our findings demonstrate that a small system of grammatical rules can be syntactically instantiated by the adult speaker in a way that strongly resembles native-speaker sentence processing...

..As there is evidence that the ELAN reflects highly automatic structure-building processes, we conclude that these processes are not yet established at age 7, but gradually develop toward adult-like processing during late childhood...

..g., re_1-reGAL). The present study replicates the P350 effect with different material, and indicates that pitch is used for lexical identification in spoken word recognition...

..This finding calls for a revision of current models of figurative language processing...

..These results indicate that both lexical priming and semantic integration are already present as early as 14 months...

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..Activation in the pars triangularis (BA 45) of the left IFG was observed only for low-frequency words. It is proposed that this region is involved in processes of lexical selection...

..This suggests that the presence of sex differences in emotional-prosodic priming depends on whether or not participants are instructed to take emotional prosody into account...

..These results speak in favour of a dual-route account for modelling the access to grammatical gender information during language comprehension...

..They indicate that not only the sound category (speech/music) but also the sound parameter (pitch/duration) can be selectively encoded...

..The data are discussed in the context of models of lexical access in speech production...

..As this effect has been shown to take place at the level of lexical selection, the data suggest that the left temporal cortex supports processes of lexical retrieval during production...

..The results are interpreted within a dual-route model of reading with the left BA 44 supporting grapheme-to-phoneme conversion and the left BA 45 being related to explicit lexical search...

..In particular, the new brain map for syntax implicates portions of the right cerebral hemisphere...

..High span readers parse the incoming information independent of intersentential context, whereas low span readers use the intersentential context off-line...

..The present findings indicate that gender differences for the analysis of auditory information are not restricted to processes in the linguistic domain such as syntax, semantics, and phonology...

..The broadly distributed negativity, which occurred during the N400 latency range observed in the three violation conditions, is thought to reflect thematic integration processes in the sentence-final position...

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