title: θ-burst stimulation of the right neocerebellar vermis selectively disrupts the practice-induced acceleration of lexical decisions.
abstract: The present study reports an experiment of cerebellar transcranial magnetic stimulation in a lexical decision task. In contrast to the study by Argyropoulos (2011), no effect of cerebellar stimulation was observed on priming sizes. However, when subjects confronted the same stimuli in the second session of participation, lexical decision latencies did not become any shorter after stimulation of the right neocerebellar vermis, in contrast to all other conditions. This finding is discussed in the light of current research in cerebellar cognitive and linguistic functions, and provides some first evidence for the recently entertained hypothesis that neocerebellar loci are significant in acquiring, storing, and retrieving associative memory traces of repeatedly co-occurring neural events in the language domain.
authors.affiliation: Language Evolution and Computation Research Unit, Linguistics and English Language, School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH8 9AD, UK. gargyropoulos@gmail.com
authors.forename: Giorgos P
authors.initials: GP
authors.lastname: Argyropoulos
authors.forename: Vasilios K
authors.initials: VK
authors.lastname: Kimiskidis
authors.forename: Sotirios
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Papagiannopoulos
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D002531:Cerebellum / Q000502:physiology*; D003657:Decision Making / Q000502:physiology*; D007839:Functional Laterality / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008875:Middle Aged; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology*; D013826:Theta Rhythm / Q000502:physiology*; D050781:Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation / Q000379:methods*; D014705:Verbal Behavior / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult