Causality provides a natural structure for organizing our experience and language. Causal reasoning during speech production is a distinct aspect of verbal communication, whose related brain processes are yet unknown. The aim of the current study was to investigate the neural mechanisms underlying the continuous generation of cause-and-effect coherences during overt word production. During fMRI...

The purpose of this study was to investigate the role of the cerebellum in the executive control of word generation using a phonemic and semantic fluency task. Phonemic fluency tasks require novel strategy to organize verbal output, and are more effortful than semantic fluency tasks. The number of category switches made between subcategories of words is a measure of mental flexibility, and is g...

On category-cued verbal fluency tasks, such as animal naming, respondents often report exemplars in semantically related clusters. We (Sung et al., 2012) used this tendency to elucidate sources of semantic dysfunction in adults with schizophrenia (SZ). Many patients with bipolar disorder (BD) show cognitive deficits that are similar to but milder than those seen in SZ. Whether this similarity e...

BACKGROUND Aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage (aSAH) survivors commonly exhibit impairment on phonemic and semantic fluency tests; however, it is unclear which of the contributing cognitive processes are compromised in aSAH patients. One method of disentangling these processes is to compare initial word production, which is a rapid, semiautomatic, frontal-executive process, and late phase word ...

Reduced semantic fluency performances have been reported in the preclinical phase of Alzheimer's disease (AD). To investigate the cognitive processes underlying this early deficit, this study analyzed the verbal production of predemented subjects for the animals category with the qualitative parameters related to clustering (i.e. the ability to generate words belonging to semantic subcategories...

Semantic memory seems to resist the effects of time, remaining stable even in more advanced ages. Objective To verify the effect of schooling level on semantic knowledge (non-living items) in normal aged. Method 48 aged individuals were divided into three groups (based on schooling) and evaluated. Three tests were applied: verbal fluency, naming and figure classification. Results We verif...

CERAD-NAB (Consortium to Establish a Registry for Alzheimer's Disease-Neuropsychological Assessment Battery) data were compared between 51 patients with frontotemporal dementia, 13 with semantic dementia, and 69 with Alzheimer's disease. There were statistically significant differences between the 3 groups. Compared with patients with Alzheimer's disease, patients with frontotemporal dementia w...