Friedemann Pulvermüller

..In languages with rich morphologies, morphemic processing seems to be supported by distinct neural networks, thereby providing evidence for a specific neuronal basis for morphology as part of the cerebral language machinery...

..These results support a new explanation of the laterality of spoken language based on the neuroanatomy of sensorimotor links and Hebbian learning principles...

..We offer an explanation of the data in neurobiological terms...

..Implications for the evolution of human language are discussed in closing...

..for example, 'lick', 'pick' and 'kick'): does the comprehension of these words specifically, rapidly and automatically activate the motor system in a somatotopic manner, and does their comprehension rely on activity in the action system?..

..Word-related distributed neuronal assemblies with specific cortical topographies can explain the observed spatiotemporal dynamics reflecting word meaning access...

..The large-scale synfire chains appear to reflect the processing of stimuli together with the context-dependent perceptual and cognitive information bound to them...

..We suggest that the early word-evoked negativity might represent an index of reorganization of language after stroke and thus an aphasia recovery potential...

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..We discuss these results in the light of modular and interactive theories of cognitive processing and draw inferences on the automaticity of both the cognitive MMN response and certain grammar processes in general...

..Activity spreading within circuits determined by between-area conduction delays accounts for comprehension-related regional activation differences in the millisecond range...

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..Together, these results suggest that word meaning can be reflected by early neuromagnetic brain responses and before the grammatical information about the word is encoded...

..Our results are consistent with associative theories postulating that words are organized in the brain as distributed cell assemblies whose cortical distributions reflect the words' meanings...

..These postulates about the brain mechanisms of language, which are rooted in principles known from neuroanatomy and neurophysiology, may provide a framework for theory-driven neuroscientific research on language...

..The data are more difficult to explain in the context of serial order models that map co-occurrence probabilities of words...

..We use a neurobiological model of serial order processing to provide a tentative explanation for the data...

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..These data show that language comprehension benefits from frontocentral action systems, indicating that action and perception circuits are interdependent...

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..This dissociation is the earliest brain signature of lexical processing of words so far reported, and may help explain the evolutionary advantage of human spoken language...

..Our results suggest that the earliest brain processes of semantic context integration can occur at approximately 100 msec after the onset of spoken words in the left inferior frontal and superior temporal cortex...

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..Topography analysis and source reconstruction indicated that left peri-sylvian cortices mediate attention effects on memory trace activation...

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..We suggest that these features of the MMN to inflected form indicate delayed activation of left-lateralized perisylvian cell assemblies that function as cortical memory traces of inflectional affixes...

..The results are discussed in relation to the continuity illusion and models of duration encoding...

..These results indicate that semantic representations grounded in the sensory-motor system play a role in the composition of sentence-level meaning, even in the case of idioms...

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..Source estimation indicates that temporal areas, particularly in the left hemisphere, are the primary cortical loci where such stimulus-specific activity increases occurred...

..A methodological implication of this study is that, in order to obtain early psycholinguistic ERP effects, stimulus variance must be kept to a minimum...

..We suggest that these results indicate activation of distributed neuronal assemblies that function as category-specific memory traces for words and may involve sensorimotor cortical structures for encoding action words...

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..In line with previous studies, these differences can be related to the areas involved in the conceptual processing of sensory (visual) and action-related information...

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..It does it in an automatic and task-free fashion, indicating its potential benefit for assessing uncooperative clinical populations...

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..Our approach can be applied to any event-related data using single-stimulus presentation, and allows a detailed characterization of the functional role of category-specific activation patterns...

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..Understanding such fast learning is key to the neurobiological explanation of the human language faculty and learning mechanisms in general...

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..N correlated positively with brain activity in left and right middle temporal gyri as well as right inferior frontal gyrus. Thus, our analysis revealed multiple distinct brain areas involved in visual word processing within one data set...

..Thus, our results indicate the existence of word-related MMN enhancement largely independent of the lexical status of the standard stimulus. This enhancement may reflect the presence of a long-term memory trace for a spoken word...

..literal meaning processing, we suggest that within ¼ of a second, compositional and abstract context-driven semantic processes in parallel contribute to the understanding of idiom meaning...

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..The results are tentatively explained in a neurocognitive framework...

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..Our findings provide behavioural and neurophysiological evidence for reduced interhemispheric cooperation in schizophrenia which may be due to impaired transfer of information from the right to the left hemisphere...

..This rules out a unified "meaning center" in the human brain and supports a dynamic view according to which words are processed by distributed neuronal assemblies with cortical topographies that reflect word semantics...

..The correspondence between finger counting habits and hemispheric motor activation is consistent with an intrinsic functional link between finger counting and number processing...

..Such predictions have been confirmed by recent experimental evidence...

..We suggest discrete combinatorial neuronal assemblies, which bind classes of sequentially occurring lexical elements into morphologically complex units, as the neurobiological basis of regular past tense inflection...

..By demonstrating a link between pathology, genetics, imaging and abstract cognitive impairments this study advances our understanding of degenerative brain disease with implications for both neuroscience and clinical practice...

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..We argue that this reflects the effect of left-hemispheric language dominance on the formation of semantic brain circuits on the basis of Hebbian correlation learning...