Prelexical and lexical processing in listening

This chapter presents a meta-analysis of hemodynamic studies on passive auditory language processing. We assess the overlap of hemodynamic activation areas and activation maxima reported in experiments involving the presentation of sentences, words, pseudowords, or sublexical or nonlinguistic auditory stimuli. Areas that have been reliably replicated are identified. The results of the meta-analysis are compared with electrophysiological, magnetoencephalographic, and clinical findings. We conclude that auditory language input is processed in a left posterior frontal and bilateral temporal cortical network. Within this network, no processing level is related to a single cortical area. The temporal lobes seem to differ with respect to their involvement in postlexical processing, in that the left temporal lobe has greater involvement than the right, and also in the degree of anatomical specialization for phonological, lexical, and sentence-level processing, with greater overlap on the right contrasting with a higher degree of differentiation on the left.