Association Between White Matter Microstructure and Verbal Fluency in Patients With Multiple Sclerosis

Blecher, Tal; Miron, Sébastian; Schneider, Galit Grimberg; Achiron, Anat; Ben-Shachar, Michal

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01607

Cited by 37 publications

(52 citation statements)

References 109 publications

(145 reference statements)

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“…The Shapiro-Wilk test confirmed that the remaining scores (N=44 for each task) were normally distributed. Consistent with previous literature (Blecher et al, 2019;Kavé, 2005;Shao et al, 2014), letter-based fluency scores were lower than category-based fluency scores, and the two tasks were correlated (r = 0.53, p < 0.05, after controlling the FDR across all behavioral measures at q< 0.05; See Figure 1). Letter-based fluency was also strongly correlated with pattern-based fluency (r = 0.6, p < 0.05).…”

Section: Verbal Fluency Scoressupporting

confidence: 90%

“…For example, category-based fluency supposedly capitalizes on the natural semantic organization of the lexicon, while letter-based fluency requires using less practiced strategies, as well as inhibiting semantically related words, making this task altogether more taxing (Basso et al, 1997). This notion is supported by consistent reports of better performance in category-based fluency compared with letterbased fluency (replicated here, and see Blecher et al, 2019;Kavé, 2005;Kavé and Knafo-Noam, 2015;Meinzer et al, 2009;Shao et al, 2014). Following the same reasoning, the morpheme-based fluency task may be even more demanding compared with the standard fluency tasks, as it requires more selective inhibition of inappropriate responses, e.g., semantic associations or inflections of previously provided words.…”

Section: Cognitive Processes Underlying the Morpheme-based Fluency Tasksupporting

confidence: 66%

“…pre-SMA (Catani et al, 2013;Thiebaut de Schotten et al, 2012). Several studies have found that the left FAT is critically involved in speech fluency in clinical populations (Blecher et al, 2019;Catani et al, 2013;Kronfeld-Duenias et al, 2016;Li et al, 2017;Mandelli et al, 2014). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of this tract's involvement in verbal fluency in healthy adults.…”

Section: Morpheme-based Fluency Is Associated With Ventral and Dorsalmentioning

confidence: 49%

“…Still, this finding provides supporting evidence for the involvement of the ventral tracts in morphological processing sampled with production tasks. Other studies reported associations between letter-or categorybased fluency and properties of several white matter tracts, in clinical patients suffering from multiple sclerosis, aphasia or stroke (Blecher et al, 2019;Griffis et al, 2017;Keser et al, 2018;Li et al, 2017; but see Vallesi and Babcock (2020) for null results in healthy adults). Morpheme-based fluency may be more challenging than standard fluency tasks, as it requires using metalinguistic knowledge for lexical search and applying more restrictive response selection criteria.…”

Section: Morpheme-based Fluency Is Associated With Ventral and Dorsalmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In this case, the ventral tracts are not expected to be involved in morphological processing in other modalities. Instead, morpheme-based fluency may map onto dorsal tracts, previously associated with other measures of verbal fluency (Blecher et al, 2019;Catani et al, 2013). Testing these hypotheses would lead to better understanding of the involvement of ventral and dorsal language tracts in morphological processing across task and modality.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A general role for ventral white matter pathways in morphological processing: going beyond reading

Yablonski

Menashe

Ben-Shachar

2020

Preprint

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The ability to recognize the structural components of words, known as morphological processing, was recently associated with the bilateral ventral white matter pathways, across different writing systems. However, it remains unclear whether these associations are specific to the context of reading. To shed light on this question, in the current study we investigated whether the ventral pathways are associated with morphological processing in an oral word production task that does not involve reading. Forty-five participants completed a morphemebased fluency task in Hebrew, as well as diffusion MRI (dMRI) scans. We used probabilistic tractography to segment the major ventral and dorsal white matter pathways, and assessed the correlations between their microstructural properties and performance on the morpheme-based fluency task. We found significant correlations between morpheme-based fluency and properties of the bilateral ventral tracts, suggesting that the involvement of these tracts in morphological processing extends beyond the reading modality. In addition, significant correlations were found in the frontal aslant tract (FAT), a dorsal tract associated with oral fluency and speech production. Together, our findings emphasize that neurocognitive associations reflect both the cognitive construct under investigation as well as the task used for its assessment. Lastly, to elucidate the biological factors underlying these correlations, we incorporated the composite hindered and restricted model of diffusion (CHARMED) framework, measured in independent scans. We found that only some of our findings could be attributed to variation in a CHARMEDbased estimate of fiber density. Further, we were able to uncover additional correlations that could not be detected using traditional dMRI indices. In sum, our results show that the involvement of the ventral tracts in morphological processing extends to the production domain, and demonstrate the added value of including sensitive structural measurements in neurocognitive investigations.

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Section: Verbal Fluency Scoressupporting

confidence: 90%