the semantic network of the preposition 'ba' in persian: a cognitive study as one of the widely used prepositions in persian, 'ba' (i.e. with) may also function as an adjective particle or affix. this paper studies various meanings of preposition 'ba' within a cognitive lexical semantics framework. it aims to show that the various meanings of this preposition do not emerge randomly. drawing the...

People can communicate by using hand actions, e.g., signs. Understanding communicative actions requires that the observer knows that the actor has an intention to communicate and the meanings of the actions. Here, we investigated how this prior knowledge affects processing of observed actions. We used functional MRI to determine changes in action processing when non-signers were told that the o...

Lexical semantic ambiguity is the phenomenon when a word has multiple meanings (e.g. 'bank'). The aim of this event-related functional MRI study was to identify those brain areas, which are involved in contextually driven ambiguity resolution. Ambiguous words were selected which have a most frequent, dominant, and less frequent, subordinate meaning. These words were presented in two types of se...

Considerable behavioral research has demonstrated that the visual word recognition system is sensitive to morphological structure. It has typically been assumed that analysis of morphologically complex words occurs only when the meaning of these words can be derived from the meanings of their constituents (e.g., hunter = hunt + er). However, results from recent behavioral research using the mas...

There have been numerous studies on the linguistic properties of the BA construction in Mandarin Chinese and the semantic meanings of this construction. However, there have not been as adequate studies on the acquisition of the BA, especially by L2 Chinese learners. This study examines the acquisition of some linguistic properties of the BA construction by the nature of those properties: some a...

In this study, we investigated the neural substrate involved in the comprehension of novel metaphoric sentences by comparing the findings to those obtained with literal and anomalous sentences using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Stimuli consisted of 63 copula sentences ("An A is a B") in Japanese with metaphorical, literal, or anomalous meanings. Thirteen normal pa...

Functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to identify the neural correlates of Chinese character and word reading. The Chinese stimuli were presented visually, one at a time. Subjects covertly generated a word that was semantically related to each stimulus. Three sorts of Chinese items were used: single characters having precise meanings, single characters having vague meanings, and two-ch...

This study proposed a design database consisting of creative and noncreative designs for creative research and discussed the correlation between creative assessment and brain activities using fMRI. We answered the following two research questions: which brain areas are activated when assessing creative designs in contrast to noncreative designs and does social evaluation influence creativity as...