The contribution of the left anterior temporal lobe in lexical-semantic processing

A renewed debate on the role of the left anterior temporal lobe (in particular the anterior superior temporal gyrus, aSTG) in speech perception is based on a diverse functional engagement of this brain region, such as in speech intelligibility (Scott et al., 2000), in lexical-semantic processing (Kotz et al., 2002, 2003a; Scott et al., 2003), in local syntactic processing (Donkers et al., 1994; Kotz et al., 2003b; Meyer et al., 2000; Friederici et al., 2003) as well as in semantic integration (e.g., Stowe et al., 2000). fMRI and ERP lesion experiments on lexical-semantic processing reveal that the aSTG is activa…