, 2008). However, no study has examined connectivity amongst different regions in the infant brain when language processing takes place. This study is the first step toward understanding how the infant brain creates networks when establishing word-referent associations. This research was supported by MEXT KAKENHI (#15300088, #22243043, Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Innovative

Areas #23120003) to M.I. and H.O., MEXT KAKENHI (#21120005) and JST PRESTO to K.K., MEXT GCOE program to Tamagawa University, BBSRC Research Development Fellowship (BB/G023069/1) to S.K., Economic and Social Research Council (ES/E024556/1) and European Research Council (ERC-SG-209704) to G.T, and Grant-in-Aid for JSPS Research Fellows (#23-2872) to M.A. We thank Yumi Nakagawa,Yuji Mizuno, Junko Kanero and Mamiko Arata for help in data collection and analysis, and Marilyn Vihman for comments on an earlier version of the manuscript. A1210477 M.A. and M.I. are joint first authors. G.T. and S.K. made equal contributions. The authors declare no competing financial interests. “
“Storing and processing RAD001 cell line word

meanings involves a widely distributed network of brain regions. Investigating how elements of this network respond to different types of word can provide important insights into the functional organisation of the system. This study focused on differential activations during comprehension of concrete versus abstract words (e.g., rope vs hope). Two main classes of theory have been proposed to account for these. The first class claims that concrete and abstract words differ in terms of their representational substrate. It is often claimed that abstract words have weak or impoverished semantic representations ( Jones, 1985, Plaut and Shallice, 1993 and Wiemer-Hastings

and Xu, 2005). Jones (1985), for example, found that participants judged it easier to predicate (i.e., generate factual statements for) concrete concepts than for abstract. This representational weakness Bay 11-7085 for abstracts might come about because they lack information gained from sensory experience. The most well-known of these is dual-coding theory ( Paivio, 1986), which states that while both concrete and abstract concepts are used and experienced verbally, only concrete words are associated with sensory-perceptual information acquired through direct experience of their referents. Paivio proposed that verbal and sensory-perceptual information were represented in separate stores and that concrete words benefited from dual-coding in both stores, while abstract words were represented only in the verbal store. Recent studies have explored other aspects of experience that might be particularly salient for abstract concepts. Abstract words are more strongly associated with emotion and valence responses ( Kousta et al., 2011 and Vigliocco et al., 2014), for example and some abstract words are closely linked to spatial and temporal relationships ( Troche, Crutch, & Reilly, 2014).