Cortical regions that showed reliable activation in an ALE meta-analysis of 87 general semantic contrasts. The words used in these experiments were chosen without regard to a particular sensory–motor attribute or category thus, the results can be interpreted as common brain areas involved in semantic processing regardless of specific semantic content.įigure 1.

Subjects might be asked, for example, to make a judgment about a semantic feature, a category relationship, or some other conceptual attributes of a word in the semantic condition and to make a judgment about the phonological or orthographic form of the word in the nonsemantic condition. Other studies used contrasting tasks to focus subjects' attention on either meaning or word form. In each case, the conditions differ in the extent to which conceptual information about the stimulus can be retrieved. A similar logic applies to studies contrasting famous against unfamiliar proper names, related against unrelated word pairs, meaningful against nonsensical sentences, and sentences against random word strings. For example, studies contrasting word processing and pseudoword processing (during, say, a lexical decision task) are based on the assumption that words activate concept representations, whereas pseudowords do not or do so less successfully. Many of these began with a general distinction between processing word meaning and processing word form without meaning.

Fernandino, in Brain Mapping, 2015 A Brain Network for General Semantic ProcessingĪ large number of neuroimaging studies provide evidence on brain regions involved in semantic processing.

Brown&#39;s semantic relations

Brown's semantic relations