Verbal working memory, that is, the temporary maintenance of linguistic information in an activated state, is typically assumed to rely on phonological representations. Recent evidence from behavioral, neuropsychological, and electrophysiological studies, however, suggests that conceptual-semantic representations may also be maintained in an activated state. We developed a new semantic working memory task that involves the maintenance of a novel conceptual combination. Functional magnetic resonance imaging data acquired during the maintenance of conceptual combinations, relative to an item recognition task without the possibility of conceptual combination, demonstrate increased activation in the posterior left middle and inferior temporal gyri (known to be involved in conceptual representations) and left inferior frontal gyrus (known to be involved in semantic control processes). We suggest that this temporo-frontal system supports maintenance of conceptual information in working memory, with the frontal regions controlling the sustained activation of heteromodal conceptual representations in the inferior temporal cortex.

Using a cross-modal lexical priming technique we provide an on-line examination of the ability of aphasic patients to construct syntactically licensed dependencies in real time. We show a distinct difference between Wernicke's and Broca's aphasic patients with respect to this form of syntactic processing: the Wernicke's patients link the elements of dependency relations in the same manner as do neurologically intact individuals; the Broca's patients show no evidence of such linkage. These findings indicate that the cerebral tissue implicated in Wernicke's aphasia is not crucial for recovering syntactically licensed structural dependencies, while that implicated in Broca's aphasia is. Moreover, additional considerations suggest that the latter region is not the locus of syntactic representations per se, but rather provides the resources that sustain the normal operating characteristics of the lexical processing system—characteristics that are, in turn, necessary for building syntactic representations in real time.

The effects of prior semantic context upon lexical access during sentence processing were examined for three groups of subjects; nonfluent agrammatic (Broca's) aphasic patients; fluent (Wernicke's) aphasic patients; and neurologically intact control patients. Subjects were asked to comprehend auditorily presented, structurally simple sentences containing lexical ambiguities, which were in a context strongly biased toward just one interpretation of that ambiguity. While listening to each sentence, subjects also had to perform a lexical decision task upon a visually presented letter string. For the fluent Wernicke's patients, as for the controls, lexical decisions for visual words related to each of the meanings of the ambiguity were facilitated. By contrast, agrammatic Broca's patients showed significant facilitation only for visual words related to the a priori most frequent interpretation of the ambiguity. On the basis of these data, we suggest that normal form-based word retrieval processes are crucially reliant upon the cortical tissue implicated in agrammatism, but that even the focal brain damage yielding agrammatism does not destroy the normally encapsulated form of word access. That is, we propose that in agrammatism, the modularity of word access during sentence comprehension is rendered less efficient but not lost. Additionally, we consider a number of broader issues involved in the use of pathological material to infer characteristics of the neurological organization of cognitive architecture.