Mapping Verb Retrieval With nTMS: The Role of Transitivity

Abstract

Navigated Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (nTMS) is used to understand the cortical organization of language in preparation for the surgical removal of a brain tumor. Action naming with finite verbs can be employed for that purpose, providing additional information to object naming. However, little research has focused on the properties of the verbs that are used in action naming tasks, such as their status as transitive (taking an object; e.g., to read) or intransitive (not taking an object; e.g., to wink). Previous neuroimaging data show higher activation for transitive compared to intransitive verbs in posterior perisylvian regions bilaterally. In the present study, we employed nTMS and production of finite verbs to investigate the cortical underpinnings of transitivity. Twenty neurologically healthy native speakers of German participated in the study. They underwent language mapping in both hemispheres with nTMS. The action naming task with finite verbs consisted of transitive (e.g., The man reads the book) and intransitive verbs (e.g., The woman winks) and was controlled for relevant psycholinguistic variables. Errors were classified in four different error categories (i.e., non-linguistic errors, grammatical errors, lexico-semantic errors and, errors at the sound level) and were analyzed quantitatively. We found more nTMS-positive points in the left hemisphere, particularly in the left parietal lobe for the production of transitive compared to intransitive verbs. These positive points most commonly corresponded to lexico-semantic errors. Our findings are in line with previous aphasia and neuroimaging studies, suggesting that a more widespread network is used for the production of verbs with a larger number of arguments (i.e., transitives). The higher number of lexico-semantic errors with transitive compared to intransitive verbs in the left parietal lobe supports previous claims for the role of left posterior areas in the retrieval of argument structure information.

Preoperative Navigated Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation: New Insight for Brain Tumor-Related Language Mapping

“…Consequently, some studies have proposed the inclusion of an action-naming task [ 47 ] to investigate grammatical and semantic abilities, which are known to rely on anatomically distinct circuits [ 48 ]. This task requires the patient to name events using an infinitive, gerund, or inflected verb form [ 49 ]. Ohlerth and colleagues compared the sensitivity of object vs. action-naming tasks for error elicitation in different cortical surfaces under rnTMS stimulation in 20 healthy participants.…”

“…Another study showed that rnTMS induced a larger number of errors with transitive compared to intransitive verb in the left hemisphere, in twenty healthy people. This may reflect the fact that the production of finite transitive verbs requires more complex lexico-semantic syntactic processes and a larger amount of argumentative structural information than intransitive verbs [ 49 ].…”

Abstracts of the International Science of Aphasia Conference, University of Bordeaux, September 2022

“…Navigated Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (nTMS) is a non-invasive method that causally identifies cortical areas involved in language processing (Ohlerth et al, 2021;Ntemou, et al, 2021). The combination of nTMS and diffusion Magnetic Resonance Imaging (dMRI) increases language identification accuracy by allowing researchers to stimulate cortical terminations of white matter tracts (Reisch et al, under review).…”