Table I.

Studies included in the meta‐analysis

Study	Imaging modality	Number of participants	Random or fixed effect	Materials	Input modality	Task
Mestres‐Missé et al. [2008]	3T fMRI	15	Random	Sentence pairs	Visual	Recognition
Tettamanti et al. [2008]	3T fMRI	18	Random	Sentences	Auditory	Passive listening
Pexman et al. [2007]	3T fMRI	20	Random	Words	Visual	Semantic categorization (consumable or not)
Fliessbach et al. [2006]	1.5T fMRI	21	Random	Words	Visual	Recognition
Harris et al. [2006]	1.5T fMRI	20	Random	Words	Visual	Semantic judgment (positive or negative)
Binder et al. [2005]	1.5T fMRI	24	Random	Words	Visual	Lexical decision
Sabsevitz et al. [2005]	1.5T fMRI	28	Random	Word triads	Visual	Semantic similarity decision
Wallentin et al. [2005]	1.5T fMRI	18	Random	Sentences	Visual and auditory	Sentence comprehension
Fiebach and Friederici [2004]	3T fMRI	12	NA	Words	Visual	Lexical decision
Noppeney and Price [2004]	2T fMRI	15	Random	Word triads	Visual	Semantic similarity decision
Whatmough et al. [2004]	PET	15	NA	Word pairs	Visual	Semantic similarity decision (read aloud if the pair is similar in meanings)
Grossman et al. [2002]	4T fMRI	16	Fixed	Words	Visual	Semantic judgment (pleasant or not)
Friederici et al. [2000]	3T fMRI	14	NA	Words	Visual	Semantic categorization (syntactic task: noun or function word; semantic task: concrete or abstract)
Jessen et al. [2000]	1.5T fMRI	14	Fixed	Words	Visual	Memory encoding
Wise et al. [2000]a	PET	18	Fixed	Words	Auditory	Passive listening
			Fixed	Word triads	Auditory	Semantic similarity decision sample
			Fixed	Words	Visual/ auditory	Passive listening/viewing
Kiehl et al. [1999]	1.5T fMRI	6	Fixed	Words	Visual	Lexical decision
Perani et al. [1999]	PET	14	Fixed	Words	Visual	Lexical decision
Mellet et al. [1998]	PET	8	Fixed	Words with definitions	Auditory	Mental image generation (concrete) and passive listening (abstract)
D'Esposito et al. [1997]	1.5T fMRI	7	NA	Words	Auditory	Mental image generation (concrete) and passive listening (abstract)

^aRelevant results taken from multistudy analysis conducted by Wise et al. [2000].