Behavioral studies have shown that engaging in a secondary task, such as talking on a cellular telephone, disrupts driving performance. This study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the impact of concurrent auditory language comprehension on the brain activity associated with a simulated driving task. Participants steered a vehicle along a curving virtual road, eit...

While conversationally common, sarcasm presents identification challenges in writing. For example, ”Oh wow!” may be expressed both sincerely and ironically. Research suggests that interpretation of ambiguous sarcasm may be context dependent, though precisely how visual and auditory cues contribute to comprehension remains unclear. To explore this, we recorded an actor performing 45 phrases sarc...

Brain activation associated with normal and speeded comprehension of expository texts on familiar and unfamiliar topics was investigated in reading and listening. The goal was to determine how brain activation and the comprehension processes it reflects are modulated by comprehension speed and topic familiarity. Passages on more familiar topics differentially activated a set of areas in the ant...

An auditory sentence comprehension task investigated the extent to which the integration of contextual and structural cues was mediated by verbal memory span with 32 English-speaking six- to eight-year-old children. Spoken relative clause sentences were accompanied by visual context pictures which fully (depicting the actions described within the relative clause) or partially (depicting several...

Pure word deafness is a disorder of auditory verbal comprehension without dysfunction of speaking, reading, or writing. This rare symptom arises from bilateral lesions in the temporal lobes or disconnection between the primary auditory cortex and Wernicke’s area. I present a right-handed 33-year-old woman who presented with pure word deafness and complex auditory hallucination with intermittent...

We present a case that is unusual in many respects from other documented incidences of auditory agnosia, including the mechanism of injury, age of the individual, and location of neurological insult. The clinical presentation is one of disturbance in the perception of spoken language, music, pitch, emotional prosody, and temporal auditory processing in the absence of significant deficits in the...