title: Disorders of single word processing.
abstract: In recent years, studies in the cognitive neuropsychology of language have helped in understanding the functional architecture of linguistic processes. It has been shown that recognizing, comprehending and producing a word entails the activation of a complex set of mechanisms, each of which can be selectively impaired as a consequence of brain damage. Investigations of aphasic subjects have demonstrated that the meaning, the pronunciation and the spelling of a word are represented independently, that category information plays a critical role in semantic organization, and that the mental vocabulary represents word class and morphological structure. These distinctions in the architecture of the lexical-semantic system, in turn, have provided the basis for PET and fMRI studies of the neural correlates of single-word processing. These experiments, in agreement with recent neurophysiological investigations, suggest that cognitive/linguistic functions are likely to be represented in distributed neural networks often encompassing more than one lobe, rather than in individual, sharply demarcated neural structures.
authors.affiliation: Neurologia Universitá Cattolica, Roma, Italy. g.miceli@mclink.it
authors.forename: G
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Miceli
mesh_terms: D001037:Aphasia / Q000503:physiopathology* / Q000523:psychology; D003072:Cognition Disorders / Q000503:physiopathology* / Q000523:psychology; D006801:Humans; D008606:Mental Processes / Q000502:physiology; D012660:Semantics; D013064:Speech Disorders / Q000523:psychology; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology