The Neural Correlates of Grammatical Gender: An fMRI Investigation
Abstract In an fMRI experiment, subjects saw a written noun and made three distinct decisions in separate sessions: Is its grammatical gender masculine or feminine (grammatical feature task)? Is it an animal or an artifact (semantic task)? Does it contain a /tch/ or a /k/ sound (phonological task)? Relative to the other experimental conditions, the grammatical feature task activated areas of the left middle and inferior frontal gyrus and of the left middle and inferior temporal gyrus. These activations fit in well with neuropsychological studies that document the correlation between left frontal lesions and damage to morphological processes in agrammatism, and the correlation between left t…
Temporal stability and representational distinctiveness: Key functions of orthographic working memory
A primary goal of working memory research has been to understand the mechanisms that permit working memory systems to effectively maintain the identity and order of the elements held in memory for sufficient time as to allow for their selection and transfer to subsequent processing stages. Based on the performance of two individuals with acquired dysgraphia affecting orthographic working memory (WM; the graphemic buffer), we present evidence of two distinct and dissociable functions of orthographic WM. One function is responsible for maintaining the temporal stability of letters held in orthographic WM, while the other is responsible for maintaining their representational distinctiveness. T…
The representation of segmental information: an fMRI investigation of the consonant-vowel distinction
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USAAvailable online 23 July 2004IntroductionRecent studies suggest that consonants and vowels are repre-sented separately in cognitive/neural space. Much of the evidencecomes from research on dysgraphia (for review, see Miceli & Cap-asso, submitted). In the first place, letter substitution errors preservethe consonant/vowel (CV) status of the target (e.g., cinema fi ciremaor cinoma, but not cintma). Second, there are reports of selectiveimpairment for consonants or vowels. Additional evidence comesfrom disorders of phonology, demonstrating the dissociability be-tween consonants and vowels (Caramazza, Chialant, Capasso, Mthe ISI was variable (mean 6.75 s). Th…