All Talk and No Action: A Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Study of Motor Cortex Activation During Action Word Production

A number of researchers have proposed that the premotor and motor areas are critical for the representation of words that refer to actions, but not objects. Recent evidence against this hypothesis indicates that the left premotor cortex is more sensitive to grammatical differences than to conceptual differences between words. However, it may still be the case that other anterior motor regions are engaged in processing a word's sensorimotor features. In the present study, we used singleand paired-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation to test the hypothesis that left primary motor cortex is activated during the retrieval of words (nouns and verbs) associated with specific actions. We found that activation in the motor cortex increased for action words compared with non-action words, but was not sensitive to the grammatical category of the word being produced. These results complement previous findings and support the notion that producing a word activates some brain regions relevant to the sensorimotor properties associated with that word regardless of its grammatical category.Psycholog

The ultrasonographic medullary 'rim sign' versus medullary 'band sign' in cats and their association with renal disease

Background Medullary rim sign (MRS) refers to a hyperechoic line in the renal medulla, reported on ultrasound examination (US) in both dogs and cats with and without kidney disease (KD). Objective To describe the different aspects of MRS in cats and to assess its association with KD. Animals Cats that underwent US examination, with MRS (study group) with and without KD and without MRS with and without KD (control groups). Methods Retrospective case-control study: cats with MRS, with or without KD (rim sign groups) and cats without MRS, with or without KD (control groups). Ultrasonographic images were blindly reviewed with attention given to the thickness and margins of the MRS recorded. Results Eighty-four cats with MRS were included and 60 cats recruited for each control group. The MRS had 2 distinct aspects: a thin hyperechoic line with well-defined margins (MRS-line) in 50/84 cats (59%) and a thick hyperechoic band with ill-defined margins (MRS-band) in 34/84 cats (41%). Twenty of 50 (40%) cats with MRS-lineand 25/34 (74%) of cats with MRS-bandhad KD. The frequency of MRS-linewas higher in cats without KD, whereas the presence of MRS-bandwas more frequent in cats with KD (P= .003). Conclusions and Clinical Importance A thick hyperechoic ill-defined band (for which the term medullary band sign is proposed) was more frequently associated with KD, whereas a thin hyperechoic well-defined line (true MRS) may be seen in cats with or without KD

All talk and no action: a transcranial magnetic stimulation study of motor cortex activation during action word production

A number of researchers have proposed that the premotor and motor areas are critical for the representation of words that refer to actions, but not objects. Recent evidence against this hypothesis indicates that the left premotor cortex is more sensitive to grammatical differences than to conceptual differences between words. However, it may still be the case that other anterior motor regions are engaged in processing a word's sensorimotor features. In the present study, we used single- and paired-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation to test the hypothesis that left primary motor cortex is activated during the retrieval of words (nouns and verbs) associated with specific actions. We found that activation in the motor cortex increased for action words compared with non-action words, but was not sensitive to the grammatical category of the word being produced. These results complement previous findings and support the notion that producing a word activates some brain regions relevant to the sensorimotor properties associated with that word regardless of its grammatical category

Morphological complexity reveals verb-specific prefrontal engagement

Neuropsychological evidence and recent rTMS studies strongly suggest that damage or inhibition of left prefrontal areas may result in specific impairment of verb morphosyntactic processing. However, functional imaging studies have so far failed to identify an area specifically related to grammatical aspects of verb knowledge. To date very few functional studies have been conducted in languages other than English, a language with limited inflectional morphology. In the present study, we make the hypothesis that neuronal responses for verb grammatical processing may be more or less evident depending on the morphological complexity of verbs in a given language. Exploiting the morphologically rich verbal paradigm typical of the Italian language we implemented an event-related functional MRI design to identify cortical regions that were active when subjects produced nouns or verbs in the context of short phrases. Results showed an area of verb-specific activation for real verbs in a small left frontal region corresponding to the intersection of BA10, BA46 and BA 47. We interpret the results as revealing that languagespecific morphological properties may modulate the pattern of grammatical specific activations. Specifically, higher degrees of morphophonological complexity may engage a greater variety of morphophonological operations, thus enhancing the possibility of activations specific for a given grammatical class.Psycholog

When Nominal Features Are Marked on Verbs: A Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Study

It has been claimed that verb processing (as opposed to noun processing) is subserved by specific neural circuits in the left prefrontal cortex. In this study, we took advantage of the unusual grammatical characteristics of clitic pronouns in Italian (e.g., lo and la in portalo and portala ‘bring it [masculine]/[feminine]’, respectively)—the fact that clitics have both nominal and verbal characteristics, to explore the neural correlates of verb and clitic processing. We used repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to suppress the excitability of the left prefrontal cortex and to assess its role in producing verb+det+noun and verb+clitic phrases. Results showed an interference effect for both kinds of phrases when stimulation was applied to the left but not to the right prefrontal cortex. However, the interference effect was significantly greater for the verb+clitic than for the verb+det+noun phrases. These findings support the view that clitics increase the morphosyntactic complexity of verbs.Psycholog

Gender congruency goes Europe: A cross-linguistic study of the gender congruency effect in Romance and Germanic languages

International audienceWe report a thorough investigation of the gender congruency effect previously reported by Cubelli, Lotto, Girelli, Paolieri, and Job (2005) in a picture-word interference study, namely slower RTs at producing Italian bare nouns in the presence of same-gender distractors than in the presence of different-gender distractors. In order to account for this finding, the authors hypothesised a double competition mechanism of lexical selection. By capitalizing on the two keyconcepts of morphological decomposability and gender transparency, we conducted a series of picture-word interference experiments in Italian (the language of Cubelli et al's study; Experiments 1-2), and Spanish (a language with very similar relevant characteristics for which a gender effect in bare noun production has also been found, see Paolieri, Lotto, Leoncini, Cubelli, & Job (2010) ; Experiment 3) as well as French, German, and Dutch, i.e. three languages with variable degrees of correspondence between gender and phonology (Experiments 4-6). Overall, our cross-linguistic data do not provide reliable evidence for an effect of grammatical gender in bare noun naming. Hence, they raise substantial problems for the hypothesis of double-competition in lexical access