Samples of spontaneous and descriptive speech were obtained from 12 patients with Huntington's disease (HD) and 24 at risk (AR) controls. The data were assessed according to a neurolinguistic protocol. HD was identified with a significant reduction in number of words produced, a diminished level of syntactic complexity, reductions of melodic line, phrase length, articulatory agility, and gramma...

What is the best way to learn how the brain analyzes linguistic input? Two popular methods have attempted to segregate and localize linguistic processes: analyses of language deficits subsequent to (mostly focal) brain disease, and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) in health. A recent Compass article by Fedorenko and Kanwisher (FK, 2009) observes that these methods group together dat...

Natural language interpretation is generally thought to be compositional, that is, the meanings of expressions are a function of the meanings of their parts and of the way the parts are syntactically combined. Theories of the syntax–semantics interface aim to articulate the details of this function. This article discusses a new research program in which psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic expe...

We propose a primal-dual path-following Mehrotra-type predictor-corrector method for solving convex quadratic semidefinite programming (QSDP) problems. For the special case when the quadratic term has the form 1 2 X •(UXU), we compute the search direction at each iteration from the Schur complement equation. We are able to solve the Schur complement equation efficiently via the preconditioned s...

The quadratic programming over one inequality quadratic constraint (QP1QC) is a very special case of quadratically constrained quadratic programming (QCQP) and attracted much attention since early 1990’s. It is now understood that, under the primal Slater condition, (QP1QC) has a tight SDP relaxation (PSDP). The optimal solution to (QP1QC), if exists, can be obtained by a matrix rank one decomp...

Severe aphasia, adult left hemispherectomy, Gilles de la Tourette syndrome (GTS), and other neurological disorders have in common an increased use of swearwords. There are shared linguistic features in common across these language behaviors, as well as important differences. We explore the nature of swearing in normal human communication, and then compare the clinical presentations of selective...

OBJECTIVES Intraoperative direct electrical stimulation (DES) is increasingly used in patients operated on for tumours in critical language areas. Although a positive impact of DES on postoperative linguistic outcome is generally advocated, the literature is only scantily documented with information about the linguistic methods applied in awake surgery. This article critically reviews the neuro...

Neurosemantics aims to learn the mapping between concepts and the neural activity which they elicit during neuroimaging experiments. Different approaches have been used to represent individual concepts, but current state-of-the-art techniques require extensive manual intervention to scale to arbitrary words and domains. To overcome this challenge, we initiate a systematic comparison of automati...

One of the functions of everyday human language is to communicate meaning. Thus, when one hears or reads the sentence, "John gave a book to Mary," some aspect of an event concerning the transfer of possession of a book from John to Mary is (hopefully) transmitted. One theoretical approach to language referred to as construction grammar emphasizes this link between sentence structure and meaning...