the acoustic properties of spoken words and that it is independent to working memory in the ADS, which mediates inner speech. Working memory studies in monkeys also suggest that in monkeys, in contrast to humans, the AVS is the dominant working memory store. In humans, downstream to the aSTG, the MTG and TP are thought to constitute the semantic lexicon, which is a long-term memory repository of audio-visual representations that are interconnected on the basis of semantic relationships. (See also the reviews by discussing this topic). The primary evidence for this role of the MTG-TP is that patients with damage to this region (e.g., patients with semantic dementia or herpes simplex virus encephalitis) are reported with an impaired ability to describe visual and auditory objects and a tendency to commit semantic errors when naming objects (i.e., semantic paraphasia). Semantic paraphasias were also expressed by aphasic patients with left MTG-TP damage and were shown to occur in non-aphasic patients after electro-stimulation to this region. or the underlying white matter pathway Two meta-analyses of the fMRI literature also reported that the anterior MTG and TP were consistently active during semantic analysis of speech and text; and an intra-cortical recording study correlated neural discharge in the MTG with the comprehension of intelligible sentences. Sentence comprehension In addition to extracting meaning from sounds, the MTG-TP region of the AVS appears to have a role in sentence comprehension, possibly by merging concepts together (e.g., merging the concept 'blue' and 'shirt' to create the concept of a 'blue shirt'). The role of the MTG in extracting meaning from sentences has been demonstrated in functional imaging studies reporting stronger activation in the anterior MTG when proper sentences are contrasted with lists of words, sentences in a foreign or nonsense language, scrambled sentences, sentences with semantic or syntactic violations and sentence-like sequences of environmental sounds. One fMRI study in which participants were instructed to read a story further correlated activity in the anterior MTG with the amount of semantic and syntactic content each sentence contained. An EEG study that contrasted cortical activity while reading sentences with and without syntactic violations in healthy participants and patients with MTG-TP damage, concluded that the MTG-TP in both hemispheres participate in the automatic (rule based) stage of syntactic analysis (ELAN component), and that the left MTG-TP is also involved in a later controlled stage of syntax analysis (P600 component). Patients with damage