Negative sentences exhibit a sustained effect in delayed verification tasks.

Negated sentences are known to be more cognitively taxing than positive ones (i.e., polarity effect).

Stable brain loci for the processing of complex syntax: A review of the current neuroimaging evidence.

We conducted a retrospective review of fMRI studies of complex syntax, in order to study the stability of the neural bases of mechanisms engaged in syntactic processing. Our review set out rigorous selection criteria of studies which we discuss, including transparency and minimality of the contrasts between stimuli, and the presence of whole brain analyses corrected for multiple comparisons. Seventeen studies with 316 participants survived our sieve.

Logical negation mapped onto the brain.

High-level cognitive capacities that serve communication, reasoning, and calculation are essential for finding our way in the world. But whether and to what extent these complex behaviors share the same neuronal substrate are still unresolved questions. The present study separated the aspects of logic from language and numerosity-mental faculties whose distinctness has been debated for centuries-and identified a new cytoarchitectonic area as correlate for an operation involving logical negation.

The processing of polar quantifiers, and numerosity perception.

We investigated the course of language processing in the context of a verification task that required numerical estimation and comparison. Participants listened to sentences with complex quantifiers that contrasted in Polarity, a logical property (e.g.

An fMRI study dissociating distance measures computed by Broca's area in movement processing: clause boundary vs. identity.

Behavioral studies of sentence comprehension suggest that processing long-distance dependencies is subject to interference effects when Noun Phrases (NP) similar to the dependency head intervene in the dependency. Neuroimaging studies converge in localizing such effects to Broca's area, showing that activity in Broca's area increases with the number of NP interveners crossed by a moved NP of the same type. To test if NP interference effects are modulated by adding an intervening clause boundary, which should by hypothesis increase the number of successive-cyclic movements, we conducted an fMRI study contrasting NP interveners with clausal (CP) interveners.