In the present review, social communication will be discussed in the context of social cognition, and cold and hot cognition. The review presents research on prosody, processing of faces, multimodal processing of voice and face, and the impact of emotion on constructing semantic meaning. Since the focus of this mini review is on brain processes involved in these cognitive functions, the bulk of...

Morphed faces depicting varying degrees of affect expression can be used to investigate the processing of ambiguous and thus more ecologically valid facial stimuli. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were measured while participants viewed a series of faces ranging in 10% increments from prototypically happy to prototypically neutral to prototypically angry. Results revealed that the late po...

Recent computational modeling and behavioral work indicate that age-related declines in the ability to represent task context may contribute to disruptions of working memory and selective attention in older adults. However, it is unclear whether age-related declines in context processing arise from a disruption of the encoding or maintenance of task context and how age-related declines in conte...

To study whether the distinction between introspective and non-introspective states of mind is an empirical reality or merely a conceptual distinction, we measured event-related potentials (ERPs) elicited in introspective and non-introspective instruction conditions while the observers were trying to detect the presence of a masked stimulus. The ERPs indicated measurable differences related to ...

Modern neuroscience is providing novel ways to measure the effects of pain. Engagingly, some of its techniques provide pictorial representations of brain activity, enabling the easy communication of complex processes. This new representationalism seems to promise great hope for the future of pain research. We are persuaded of the scientific benefits that might result by those passionate about t...

UNLABELLED We examined neural activity mediating semantic and syntactic processing in 27 preschool-age children who stutter (CWS) and 27 preschool-age children who do not stutter (CWNS) matched for age, nonverbal IQ and language abilities. All participants displayed language abilities and nonverbal IQ within the normal range. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were elicited while participant...

Whereas most previous studies on emotion in language have focussed on single words, we investigated the influence of the emotional valence of a word on the syntactic and semantic processes unfolding during sentence comprehension, by means of event-related brain potentials (ERP). Experiment 1 assessed how positive, negative, and neutral adjectives that could be either syntactically correct or in...

Verbs contain multifaceted information about both the semantics of an action, and potential argument structures. Linguistic theory classifies verbs according to whether the denoted action has an inherent (telic) end-point (fall, awaken), or whether it is considered homogenous, or atelic (read, worship). The aim of our study was to examine how this distinction influences on-line sentence process...

In this study, event related potentials (ERPs) were used to investigate the extent to which dyslexics (aged 9-13 years) differ from normally reading controls in early ERPs, which reflect prelexical orthographic processing, and in late ERPs, which reflect implicit phonological processing. The participants performed an implicit reading task, which was manipulated in terms of letter-specific proce...

In general, language comprehension is surprisingly reliable. Listeners very rapidly extract meaning from the unfolding speech signal, on a word-by-word basis, and usually successfully. Research on 'semantic illusions' however suggests that under certain conditions, people fail to notice that the linguistic input simply doesn't make sense. In the current event-related brain potentials (ERP) stud...