The autocracy of meaning: Intact visuo-imitative processes may not compensate for meaningful gestures.

The dual-route models of action distinguish between a semantic and a non-semantic visuo-motor route to execute different types of gestures. Despite the large amount of evidence in support to the model, some aspects are debated. One issue concerns the recruitment of the visuo-motor route to correctly execute meaningful gestures when the semantic route is damaged.

Disentangling phonological and articulatory processing: A neuroanatomical study in aphasia.

Phonological and articulatory programming impairments may co-occur in aphasic patients and previous research does not offer a clear-cut picture of their anatomical counterparts. Hickok and Poeppel (2007) put forward a seminal model of speech processes. The ventral stream (mostly bilateral) would be involved in speech recognition and phonological-lexical processing, whereas the dorsal stream (largely lateralized to the left hemisphere) would map phonological representations onto articulatory motor patterns.

Understanding the mental lexicon through neglect dyslexia: a study on compound noun reading.

The present study employs neglect dyslexia (ND) as an experimental model to study compound-word processing; in particular, it investigates whether compound constituents are hierarchically organized at mental level and addresses the possibility of whole-word representation. Seven Italian-speaking patients suffering from ND participated in a word naming task. Both left-headed (pescespada, swordfish) and right-headed (astronave, spaceship) Italian compound nouns were used as stimuli.

The multiple-lemma representation of Italian compound nouns: a single case study of deep dyslexia.

It is not clear how compound words are represented within the influential framework of the lemma-lexeme theory. Theoretically, compounds could be structured through a multiple lemma architecture, in which the lemma nodes of both the compound and its constituents are involved in lexical processing. If this were the case, syntactic properties of both the compound and its constituents should play a role when performing tasks involving compound processing, e.

A new approach to rhythm cueing of cognitive functions: the case of ideomotor apraxia.

Although positive effects of rhythm cueing on motor control in neurologic disorders are known, no studies have yet focused on patients suffering from impaired programming of complex actions. One patient suffering from ideomotor apraxia (a potentially ideal experimental paradigm to test the effect of rhythm on high-level motor control) underwent two rehabilitation training sets differing only for the presence or absence of rhythm cueing. Both sets of training increased the patient's proficiency, but rhythm cueing was significantly more effective, during the training as well as during the post-training uncued test.

Neural dynamics of reading morphologically complex words.

Despite considerable research interest, it is still an open issue as to how morphologically complex words such as "car+s" are represented and processed in the brain. We studied the neural correlates of the processing of inflected nouns in the morphologically rich Finnish language. Previous behavioral studies in Finnish have yielded a robust inflectional processing cost, i.

Verb-noun double dissociation in aphasia: theoretical and neuroanatomical foundations.

This paper reports the results of several studies on the mechanisms underlying Verb-Noun (V-N) dissociation. The objectives of the studies were to ascertain the location of the lesions causing predominant V or N impairment and to shed light on the different mental representations of these word classes through analyses of the data from neuropsychological patients. With regard to lesion sites, results obtained through an anatomo-correlative study on 15 V-impaired and 5 N-impaired aphasic patients indicate that lesions causing predominant N impairment were mostly located in the middle and inferior left temporal area.

Noun-verb dissociation in aphasia: the role of imageability and functional locus of the lesion.

Aphasic patients occasionally manifest a dissociated naming ability between objects and actions: this phenomenon has been interpreted as evidence of a separate organization for nouns and verbs in the mental lexicon. Nevertheless Bird et al. [Bird, H.