Anatomy of word and sentence meaning. Academic Article uri icon

Overview

abstract

  • Reading and listening involve complex psychological processes that recruit many brain areas. The anatomy of processing English words has been studied by a variety of imaging methods. Although there is widespread agreement on the general anatomical areas involved in comprehending words, there are still disputes about the computations that go on in these areas. Examination of the time relations (circuitry) among these anatomical areas can aid in understanding their computations. In this paper, we concentrate on tasks that involve obtaining the meaning of a word in isolation or in relation to a sentence. Our current data support a finding in the literature that frontal semantic areas are active well before posterior areas. We use the subject's attention to amplify relevant brain areas involved either in semantic classification or in judging the relation of the word to a sentence to test the hypothesis that frontal areas are concerned with lexical semantics and posterior areas are more involved in comprehension of propositions that involve several words.

publication date

  • February 3, 1998

Research

keywords

  • Pattern Recognition, Visual
  • Speech Perception

Identity

PubMed Central ID

  • PMC33814

Scopus Document Identifier

  • 0032477851

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

  • 10.1073/pnas.95.3.899

PubMed ID

  • 9448257

Additional Document Info

volume

  • 95

issue

  • 3