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- Neurolinguistics: A Brief Historical Perspective
- Neurolinguistic Studies of Patients with Acquired Aphasias
- Electrophysiological Methods in the Study of Language Processing
- Studying Language with Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)
- Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation to Study the Neural Network Account of Language
- Magnetoencephalography and the Cortical Dynamics of Language Processing
- Shedding Light on Language Function and Its Development with Optical Brain Imaging
- What Has Direct Cortical and Subcortical Electrostimulation Taught Us about Neurolinguistics?
- Diffusion Imaging Methods in Language Sciences
- Neuroplasticity: Language and Emotional Development in Children with Perinatal Stroke
- The Neurolinguistics of Bilingualism: Plasticity and Control
- Language and Aging
- Language Plasticity in Epilepsy
- Language Development in Deaf Children: Sign Language and Cochlear Implants
- Neuromotor Organization of Speech Production
- The Neural Organization of Signed Language: Aphasia and Neuroscience Evidence
- Understanding How We Produce Written Words: Lessons from the Brain
- Motor Speech Disorders
- Investigating the Spatial and Temporal Components of Speech Production
- The Dorsal Stream Auditory-Motor Interface for Speech
- Neural Representations of Concept Knowledge
- Finding Concepts in Brain Patterns: From Feature Lists to Similarity Spaces
- The How and What of Object Knowledge in the Human Brain
- Neural Basis of Monolingual and Bilingual Reading
- Dyslexia and Its Neurobiological Basis
- Speech Perception: A Perspective from Lateralization, Motorization, and Oscillation
- Sentence Processing: Toward a Neurobiological Approach
- Comprehension of Metaphors and Idioms: An Updated Meta-analysis of Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Studies
- Language Comprehension and Emotion: Where Are the Interfaces, and Who Cares?
- Grammatical Categories
- Neurocognitive Mechanisms of Agrammatism
- Verbal Working Memory
- Subcortical Contributions to Language
- Lateralization of Language
- Neural Mechanisms of Music and Language
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter reviews progress made by brain-reading (neurosemantic) studies that use multivariate analytic methods to delineate the nature, content, and neuroanatomical distribution of the neural representation of concept knowledge in semantic memory. Concept knowledge underlies almost all human thought, communication, and daily activity. The chapter describes how neurosemantic research has provided initial answers to such prominent questions as: What types of information are encoded in a given neural concept representation? To what extent are neural concept representations common across different people? Do neural concept representations evoked by pictures differ from those evoked by language? How are abstract versus concrete concepts represented in the brain? How does the neural representation of a concept evolve while a new concept is being learned? What are the properties and implications of the data analytic techniques that are used in this research area? The initial answers to these questions illuminate how the properties of brain organization impose a structure on the neural representations of concepts.
Andrew J. Bauer received his PhD at Carnegie Mellon University and is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto. His research uses machine learning techniques applied to fMRI data to understand where and how knowledge is neurally represented in the brain, and how the brain changes with learning new concepts.
Marcel A. Just, D. O. Hebb Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at Carnegie Mellon and Director of its Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging, uses fMRI to study language-related neural processing. The research uses machine learning and other techniques to identify the semantic components of the neural signature of individual concepts, such as concrete objects (e.g., hammer), emotions (e.g., sadness), and quantities (e.g., three). The projects examine normal concept representations in college students, as well as disordered concepts in special populations, such as patients with autism or suicidal ideation.
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