BACKGROUND Fragile X-associated tremor/ataxia syndrome (FXTAS), a neurodegenerative disorder caused by FMR1 gene premutations, typically associated with frontal-subcortical type cognitive impairments. High prevalence (~50%) of superimposed Alzheimer׳s pathology has been reported in FMR1 premutation carriers, and standardized neuropsychological tests have not yielded any robust discriminators be...

Abnormal activation of semantic networks characterizes schizophrenia and can be studied using the N400 event-related potential (ERP). N400 is elicited by words that are not primed by the preceding context and provides a direct measure of the neural mechanisms underlying semantic priming. Semantic priming refers to facilitated semantic processing gained through pre-exposure to semantic context, ...

OBJECTIVE The study investigated (a) to what extent semantic/emotional processing modulates the N400 wave of the event-related potentials (ERPs) during reading, (b) the influence of impulsivity trait on neurocognitive systems underlying semantic/emotional processing related to the generation of the N400 wave. METHODS A canonical semantic sentence processing paradigm, known to selectively elic...

Converging neuroscientific evidence suggests the existence of close links between language and sensorimotor cognition. Accordingly, during the comprehension of meaningful actions, our brain would recruit semantic-related operations similar to those associated with the processing of language information. Consistent with this view, electrophysiological findings show that the N400 component, tradi...

Self-positivity bias is one of the well-studied psychological phenomena, however, little is known about the bias in the specific dimension on social interaction, which we called herein interpersonal self-positivity bias—people tend to evaluate themselves more positively on social interactions, prefer to be included rather than to be excluded by others. In the present study, we used a modified s...

Thought disorder in schizophrenia may involve abnormal semantic activation or faulty working memory maintenance. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while sentences reading "THE NOUN WAS ADJECTIVE/VERB" were presented to 34 schizophrenic and 34 control subjects. Some nouns were homographs with dominant and subordinate meanings. Their sentence ending presented information crucial for i...

Although the neurocognitive mechanisms of nonaffective language comprehension have been studied extensively, relatively less is known about how the emotional meaning of language is processed. In this study, electrophysiological responses to affectively positive, negative, and neutral words, presented within nonconstraining, neutral contexts, were evaluated under conditions of explicit evaluatio...

Stereotypes from the major nationality toward minorities constitute a widely concerning problem in many countries. As reported by previous studies, stereotypes can be activated by media information that portrays the negative aspects of the target group. The current study focused on the neural basis of the modulation of negative media information on Han Chinese stereotypes toward Uyghurs by usin...

In this study we investigated the availability of non-target language semantic features in bilingual speech processing. We recorded EEG from Dutch-English bilinguals who listened to spoken sentences in their L2 (English) or L1 (Dutch). In Experiments 1 and 3 the sentences contained an interlingual homophone. The sentence context was either biased towards the target language meaning of the homop...

An important question in the study of language is to what degree semantic and syntactic processes are automatic or controlled. This study employed an attentional blink (AB) paradigm to manipulate awareness in the processing of target words in order to assess automaticity in semantic and syntactic processing. In the semantic block, targets occurring both within and outside the AB period elicited...