Abstract
In this chapter, we describe the processes underlying language comprehension, both in the visual modality of reading and in the auditory modality of listening, by focusing on the main stages of linguistic information processing, from the sensory to the symbolic levels. Given the particular nature of the research techniques used, linguistic production mechanisms will not be addressed here, because of the well-known motor-related electromagnetic artifacts induced by spontaneous speech. Briefly, linguistic production mechanisms are based on the ability to: formulate a thought by accessing conceptual representations, provide it with a correct structure from the lexical (semantics) and syntactic points of view (ordering and attribution of roles), access the phonologic and phonemic form of the various discourse parts (nouns, verbs, function words), pre-program the muscular and articulatory movements involved in phonation, and implement those commands by performing the emission of appropriate linguistic phonemes fluently and with the right prosody.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Coltheart M, Rastle K, Perry C et al (2001) DRC: a dual route cascade model of visual word recognition and reading aloud. Psychol Review 108:204–256
Marshall JC, Newcombe F (1973) Patterns of paralexia: a psycholinguistic approach. J Psycholinguist Res 2:175–199
Temple CM, Marshall JC (1983) A case study of developmental phonological dyslexia. Br J Psychol 74: 517–533
Regan D (1989) Human brain electrophysiology: evoked potentials and evoked magnetic fields in science and medicine. Elsevier, New York
Zani A, Proverbio AM (eds) (2003) The cognitive electrophysiology of mind and brain. Academic Press/Elsevier, San Diego
Salmelin R (2007) Clinical neurophysiology of language: the MEG approach. Clin Neurophysiol 118:237–54
Kutas M (1987) Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) elicited during rapid serial visual presentation of congruous and incongruous sentences. EEG Clin Neurophysiol Suppl 40:406–411
Kutas M, Hillyard SA (1980) Reading senseless sentences: brain potentials reflect semantic incongruity. Science 11; 207:203–205
Cohen L, Dehaene S (2004) Specialization within the ventral stream: the case for the visual word form area. Neuroimage 22:466–476
Kronbichler M, Hutzler F, Wimmer H et al (2004) The visual word form area and the frequency with which words are encountered: evidence from a parametric fMRI study. Neuroimage 21:946–953
McCandliss BD, Cohen L, Dehaene S (2003) The visual word form area: expertise for reading in the fusiform gyrus. Trends Cogn Sci 7:293–299
Price CJ, Devlin JT (2004) The pro and cons of labelling a left occipitotemporal region: “the visual word form area”. Neuroimage 22:477–479
Cohen L, Dehaene S, Naccache L et al (2000) The visual word form area. Spatial and temporal characterization of an initial stage of reading in normal subjects and posterior splitbrain patients. Brain 123:291–307
Kuriki S, Takeuchi F, Hirata Y (1998) Neural processing of words in the human extrastriate visual cortex. Cogn Brain Res 6:193–203
Nobre AC, Allison T, McCarthy G (1994) Word recognition in the human inferior temporal lobe. Nature 372:260–263
Petersen SE, Fox PT, Posner M et al (1988) Positron emission tomographic studies of the cortical anatomy of single-word processing. Nature 331:585–589
Walla P, Endl W, Lindinger G et al (1999) Early occipito-parietal activity in a word recognition task: an EEG and MEG study. Clin Neurophysiol 10:1378–1387
Mechelli A, Gorno-Tempini ML, Price CJ (2003) Neuroimaging studies of word and pseudoword reading: consistencies, inconsistencies and limitations. J Cogn Neurosci 15:260–271
Bentin S, Mouchetant-Rostaing Y, Giard MH et al (1999) ERP manifestations of processing printed words at different psycholinguistic levels: time course and scalp distribution. J Cogn Neurosci 11:35–60
Helenius P, Tarkiainen A, Cornelissen P et al (1999) Dissociation of normal feature analysis and deficient processing of letter-strings in dyslexic adults. Cereb Cortex 9:476–483
Tarkiainen A, Helenius P, Hansen PC et al (1999) Dynamics of letter string perception in the human occipitotemporal cortex. Brain 122:2119–2132
Proverbio AM, Čok B, Zani A (2002) ERP measures of language processing in bilinguals. J Cogn Neurosci 14:994–1017
Proverbio AM, Vecchi L, Zani A (2004) From orthography to phonetics: ERP measures of grapheme-to-phoneme conversion mechanisms in reading. J Cogn Neurosci 16:301–317
Salmelin R, Helenius P, Service E (2000) Neurophysiology of fluent and impaired reading: a magnetoencephalographic approach. J Clin Neurophysiol 17:163–174
Shaywitz BA, Shaywitz SE, Pugh KR et al (2002) Disruption of posterior brain systems for reading in children with developmental dyslexia. Biol Psychiatry 52:101–110
Proverbio AM, Wiedemann F, Adorni R et al (2007) Dissociating object familiarity from linguistic properties in mirror word reading. Behav Brain Funct 3:43
Fiebach CJ, Friederici AD, Muller K, von Cramon DY (2002) fMRI evidence for dual routes to the mental lexicon in visual word recognition. J Cogn Neurosci 14:11–23
Rodriguez-Fornells A, Schmitt BM, Kutas M, Munte TF (2002) Electrophysiological estimates of the time course of semantic and phonological encoding during listening and naming. Neuropsychologia 40:778–787
Simos PG, Breier JI, Fletcher JM et al (2002) Brain mechanisms for reading words and pseudowords: an integrated approach. Cereb Cortex 12:297–305
Grossi G, Coch D, Coffey-Corina S et al (2001) Phonological processing in visual rhyming: a developmental ERP study. J Cogn Neurosci 13:610–625
Rugg MD, Barrett SE (1987) Event-related potentials and the interaction between orthographic and phonological information in a rhyme-judgment task. Brain Lang 32:336–361
Binder JR, Frost JA, Hammeke TA et al (2000) Human temporal lobe activation by speech and nonspeech sounds. Cereb Cortex 10:512–528
Proverbio AM, Zani A (2003) Time course of brain activation during graphemic/phonologic processing in reading: an ERP study. Brain Lang 87:412–420
Proverbio AM, Zani A (2005) Developmental changes in the linguistic brain after puberty. Trends Cogn Sci 9:164–167
Booth JR et al (2004) Development of brain mechanisms for processing orthographic and phonologic representations. J Cogn Neurosci 16:1234–1249
Mody M, Studdert-Kennedy M, Brady S (1997) Speech perception deficits in poor readers: auditory processing or phonological coding? J Exp Child Psychol 64:199–231
Serniclaes W, Sprenger-Charolles L, Carre R, Demonet JF (2001) Perceptual discrimination of speech sounds in developmental dyslexia. J Speech Lang Hear Res 44:384–399
Näätänen R, Brattico E, Tervaniemi M (2003) Mismatch negativity (MMN): a probe to auditory cognition and perception in basic and clinical research. In: Zani A, Proverbio AM (eds) The cognitive electrophysiology of mind and brain. Academic Press, San Diego
Kujala T, Naatanen R (2001) The mismatch negativity in evaluating central auditory dysfunction in dyslexia. Neurosci Biobehav Rev 25:535–543
Leppanen PH, Pihko E, Eklund KM, Lyytinen H (1999) Cortical responses of infants with and without a genetic risk for dyslexia: II. Group effects. Neuroreport 10:969–973
King JW, Kutas M (1998) Neural plasticity in the dynamics of human visual word recognition. Neurosci Lett 244:616–614
Schendan HE, Ganis G, Kutas M (1998) Neurophysiological evidence for visual perceptual categorization of words and faces within 150 ms. Psychophysiology 35:240–251
Assadollahi R, Pulvermüller F (2003) Early influences of word length and frequency: a group study using MEG. Neuroreport 14:1183–1187
Pulvermüller F, Assadollahi R, Elbert T (2001) Neuromagnetic evidence for early semantic access in word recognition. Eur J Neurosci 13:201–205
Johnson R Jr (1986) A triarchic model of P300 amplitude. Psychophysiology 23:367–384
Donchin E (1987) The P300 as a metric for mental workload. EEG Clin Neurophysiol Suppl 39:338–343
Van Berkum JJA, Hagoort P, Brown CM (1999) Semantic integration in sentences and discourse: evidence from the N400. J Cogn Neurosci 11:657–671
Hagoort P, Hald L, Bastiaansen M, Petersson KM (2004) Integration of word meaning and world knowledge in language comprehension. Science 304:438–441
Friederici AD (2002) Towards a neural basis of auditory sentence processing. Trends Cogn Sci 6:78–84
Friederici AD (1995)The time course of syntactic activation during language processing: a model based on neuropsychological and neurophysiological data. Brain Lang 50:259–281
Münte TF, Heinze HJ, Mangun GR (1993) Dissociation of brain activity related to syntactic and semantic aspects of language. J Cogn Neurosci 5:335–344
Osterhout L, Holcomb PJ (1992) Event-related brain potentials elicited by syntactic anomaly. J Memory Lang 31:785–806
Hagoort P (2003) How the brain solves the binding problem for language: a neurocomputational model of syntactic processing. NeuroImage 20:18–29
Federmeier KD, Kluender R, Kutas M (2002) Aligning linguistic and brain views on language comprehension, In: Zani A, Proverbio AM (eds) The cognitive electrophysiology of mind and brain. Academic Press, San Diego
Hernandez A, Li P, MacWhinney B (2005) The emergence of competing modules in bilingualism. Trends Cogn Sci 9:220–225
Proverbio AM, Adorni R, Zani A (2007) The organization of multiple languages in polyglots: interference or independence? J Neuroling 20:25–49
Illes J, Francis WS, Desmond JE et al (1999) Convergent cortical representation of semantic processing in bilinguals. Brain Lang 70:347–363
Paradis M (1996) Selective deficit in one language is not a demonstration of different anatomical representation. Comments on Gomez-Tortosa et al (1995). Brain Lang 54:170–173
Perani D, Abutalebi J (2005) The neural basis of first and second language processing. Current Opin Neurobiol 15:202–206
Roux FE, Lubrano V, Lauwers-Cances V et al (2004) Intra-operative mapping of cortical areas involved in reading in mono-and bilingual patients. Brain 127:1796–1810
Dehaene S, Dupoux E, Mehler J et al (1997) Anatomical variability in the cortical representation of first and second language. Neuroreport 8:3809–3815
Lucas TH, McKhann GM, Ojemann GA (2004) Functional separation of languages in the bilingual brain: a comparison of electrical stimulation language mapping in 25 bilingual patients and 117 monolingual control patients. J Neurosurg 101:449–457
Fabbro F, Gran L, Basso G, Bava A (1990) Cerebral lateralization in simultaneous interpretation. Brain Lang 39:69–89
Proverbio AM, Adorni R, Del Zotto M, Zani A (2005) The effect of age of acquisition and proficiency on language-related brain activation in interpreters: an ERP study. Psychophysiology 42(S1):S7
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2010 Springer-Verlag Italia
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Mado Proverbio, A., Zani, A. (2010). Electromagnetic Indices of Language Processing. In: Balconi, M. (eds) Neuropsychology of Communication. Springer, Milano. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-88-470-1584-5_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-88-470-1584-5_4
Publisher Name: Springer, Milano
Print ISBN: 978-88-470-1583-8
Online ISBN: 978-88-470-1584-5
eBook Packages: MedicineMedicine (R0)