The immense amount of brain imaging data that have accumulated over the 20 past years relating to language functions and brain activities/structures now make it possible to realize meta-analyses so that main trends of structure-function relationships can be outlined. While the bedrock of knowledge built upon the early studies of aphasia has not been disproven by brain imaging studies, the latter yielded refined insights on the functions of some specific parts of the cortical regions that support language abilities such as the main structure involved in speech production and comprehension, reading, or those supporting phonological, lexical semantic and syntactical processes. However, technical limitations of brain imaging, especially its relatively bad signal-to-noise ratio, as well as the number of factors, amongst which unknown ones, that account for the inter-individual variability in neural responses to a given task or stimulus type, make analyses at the individual level still a challenge. It may be that the quest of brain images of language will remain an infinite one just as the study of language itself.

It is now widely accepted that lexical access is language non-selective in bilinguals. However, in the domain of syntax, it is much less clear whether such non-selectivity applies. Observational production studies have highlighted many instances of syntactic borrowing between languages in bilingual children and such borrowings tend to remain in adulthood. In the present study, we have tested for the first time whether such syntactic co-activation effects also exist in comprehension, in the case of early fluent bilinguals. We used event-related potentials in conjunction with a binary decision paradigm known to elicit modulations of the N2 component to show that Welsh-English bilingual participants are prepared to accept an adjective in post-nominal position in an English sentence despite the fact such word order is illegal in English. This effect, which was not found in English monolingual participants, can be interpreted as the consequence of Welsh grammar activation because the adjective is in post-nominal position in Welsh. Our results allow us to conclude that syntactic activation is language non-selective during reading in early bilinguals.

Children in the course of lexical development frequently produce non-conventional utterances containing verbs (such as “to kill a tomato”). Most studies consider these utterances as errors, rather than approximations that demonstrate a child’s semantic flexibility and ability to use imprecise but meaningful language in order to compensate for a lack of vocabulary. In this study, we show that children with specific language impairment (SLI) produce semantic approximations more frequently than non-impaired children. This result shows that study of non conventional productions gives a new light on the lexical profiles of children with SLI and revealing their ability to compensate for lexical difficulties.

The ability to understand non-literal language is an essential component of daily language use and an impairment of this ability could have an impact on individual social life.  However, very few studies have examined how the educational level affects this ability in older adults. Understanding metaphors, like many other non-literal language processes, produces an apparent need to go beyond what is literally stated in order to apprehend speakers’ communicative intent and, consequently, the meanings of utterances. The aim of this study was to assess the effect of educational level on metaphor understanding in older adults. Older right-handed participants were evaluated using a semantic priming paradigm. The results revealed that the participants’ educational level plays an important part in metaphor processing.