Fig. 5.

Semantic brain mechanisms. Top left panel: Areas of particular importance for general semantic processing as proposed in the literature. iFC inferior frontal cortex, iPC inferior parietal cortex, sTC superior temporal cortex, m/iTC middle/inferior temporal cortex, aTC anterior temporal cortex, TP temporal pole. Top right panel: Cortical areas where semantic category specificity was reported in neuropsychological patient studies and neuroimaging research—for word categories semantically related to actions (for example, “grasp”), numbers (“seven”), space (prepositions, e.g., “under”), sound (“bell”), color (“green”), shape (“square”), animals (“cat”), tools (“knife”) and abstract entities (“love”, “beauty”). Middle panel: Model of general lexico-semantic circuits shared by all word types (leftmost graph) and category-specific circuits for four different semantic word types (from left to right: face-related, arm-related and leg-related action words, form-related word). Bottom panel: Brain activation for the same types of words as revealed by fMRI experiments and cluster analysis (adopted from Pulvermüller 2013)