Results support the possibility that different levels of dopaminergic neuromodulation can subtend hemispheric differences in semantic priming, corresponding to focused priming in the left hemisphere and to extended priming in the right hemisphere. Furthermore, results can account for priming perturbations in schizophrenia depending on the level of dopamine. (c) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All

rights reserved.”
“Errors in the production of verb inflections, especially tense inflections, are pervasive in agrammatic Broca’s aphasia (*The boy eat). The neurolinguistic underpinnings of these errors are debated. One group of theories attributes verb inflection errors to disruptions in encoding the verb’s morphophonological form, resulting from either a general phonological deficit or a morphological affixation impairment. A second check details group of theories attribute verb inflection errors to disruptions that arise during sentence formulation, either for syntactic reasons or due to impairments in making fine semantic distinctions between inflectional variants of a verb (+PAST -> ate, hugged; +FUTURE -> will eat, will hug). These morphophonological and morphosemantic accounts were evaluated by comparing www.selleckchem.com/products/incb28060.html the efficacy of two treatment protocols that exclusively targeted either morphophonological operations or morphosemantic

distinctions. Using a single participant design, it was found that aphasic individuals who received morphosemantic treatment showed significant improvement in accurate production of trained and untrained verb inflections in sentence

contexts. In contrast, individuals who received morphophonological treatment failed to show improvements in accuracy of sentence production, although the number and diversity of inflected verbs increased. The differential outcomes suggest that morphosemantic impairments contribute to verb inflection deficits in agrammatic aphasia to a greater extent than morphophonological impairments, at least in this group of participants. (c) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.”
“After hemispherectomy (removal or disconnection of an entire cerebral hemisphere) in childhood for treatment of intractable epilepsy, gross speech and language functions are often rescued. Whether more complex functions, such as syntactic processing, are BCKDHA selectively impaired, remains controversial. Here we present a cross-sectional study of expressive and receptive language functions in 30 patients who have undergone hemispherectomy (17 left, 13 right). The patients had developed epilepsy-induced pathology either during the pre/perinatal period (19 cases), or after a period of normal development (11 cases; onset range=20 months to 10 years). The patients were assessed at least 1 year post surgery on tests of receptive vocabulary, expressive and receptive grammar, instruction comprehension, and semantic association.