Syntactic Processing Depends on Dorsal Language Tracts

Wilson, Stephen M.; Galantucci, Sebastiano; Tartaglia, Maria Carmela; Rising, Kindle; Patterson, Dianne; Henry, Maya L.; Ogar, Jennifer M.; Deleon, Jessica; Miller, Bruce L.; Gorno‐Tempini, Maria Luisa

doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2011.09.014

Cited by 282 publications

(247 citation statements)

References 39 publications

(84 reference statements)

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“…The AF/SLF system is considered as the anatomical background mediating the elaboration of auditory and somato-sensory inputs from the temporal lobe and the SMG and their conversion in working phonological-phonetic representations, which are then transferred to the VPMC to be translated into articulatory motor effectors [Catani et al, 2005b;Dick et al, 2014;Duffau, 2014]. Some Authors also hypothesized the involvement of the dorsal stream in complex syntactic processing during language comprehension [Brauer et al, 2013;Wilson et al, 2011]. Our anatomical data about the adjacent frontal terminations of AF and indirect anterior SLF match with functional results, showing that verbal apraxia and phonological paraphasias are paired at the level of the dorsal portion of the VPMC, and the most ventral portion of the posterior third of the MFG (Fig.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Structural and functional integration between dorsal and ventral language streams as revealed by blunt dissection and direct electrical stimulation

Sarubbo

Benedictis

Merler

et al. 2016

Human Brain Mapping

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The most accepted framework of language processing includes a dorsal phonological and a ventral semantic pathway, connecting a wide network of distributed cortical hubs. However, the cortico-subcortical connectivity and the reciprocal anatomical relationships of this dual-stream system are not completely clarified. We performed an original blunt microdissection of 10 hemispheres with the exposition of locoregional short fibers and six long-range fascicles involved in language elaboration. Special attention was addressed to the analysis of termination sites and anatomical relationships between long- and short-range fascicles. We correlated these anatomical findings with a topographical analysis of 93 functional responses located at the terminal sites of the language bundles, collected by direct electrical stimulation in 108 right-handers. The locations of phonological and semantic paraphasias, verbal apraxia, speech arrest, pure anomia, and alexia were statistically analyzed, and the respective barycenters were computed in the MNI space. We found that terminations of main language bundles and functional responses have a wider distribution in respect to the classical definition of language territories. Our analysis showed that dorsal and ventral streams have a similar anatomical layer organization. These pathways are parallel and relatively segregated over their subcortical course while their terminal fibers are strictly overlapped at the cortical level. Finally, the anatomical features of the U-fibers suggested a role of locoregional integration between the phonological, semantic, and executive subnetworks of language, in particular within the inferoventral frontal lobe and the temporoparietal junction, which revealed to be the main criss-cross regions between the dorsal and ventral pathways. Hum Brain Mapp 37:3858-3872, 2016. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Structural and functional integration between dorsal and ventral language streams as revealed by blunt dissection and direct electrical stimulation

Sarubbo

Benedictis

Merler

et al. 2016

Human Brain Mapping

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“…It is a classical indicator of lesion severity (Bates et al 2003). FA value is one of the most widely used variables to evaluate the integrity of white matter tracts in a given voxel (Rolheiser et al 2011;Wilson et al 2011), reflecting fiber density, axonal diameter, and myelination in white matter (Basser and Pierpaoli 1996). In our dataset, each voxel in each patient had a lesion value (categorical variable: lesion or intact) from the T1 lesion map and a FA value (continuous variable) from the normalized FA map.…”

Section: The Index Of White Matter Tract Integritymentioning

confidence: 99%

White matter pathway supporting phonological encoding in speech production: a multi-modal imaging study of brain damage patients

Han

Gong

et al. 2014

Brain Struct Funct

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In speech production, an important step before motor programming is the retrieval and encoding of the phonological elements of target words. It has been proposed that phonological encoding is supported by multiple regions in the left frontal, temporal and parietal regions and their underlying white matter, especially the left arcuate fasciculus (AF) or superior longitudinal fasciculus (SLF). It is unclear, however, whether the effects of AF/SLF are indeed related to phonological encoding for output and whether there are other white matter tracts that also contribute to this process. We comprehensively investigated the anatomical connectivity supporting phonological encoding in production by studying the relationship between the integrity of all major white matter tracts across the entire brain and phonological encoding deficits in a group of 69 patients with brain damage. The integrity of each white matter tract was measured both by the percentage of damaged voxels (structural imaging) and the mean fractional anisotropy value (diffusion tensor imaging). The phonological encoding deficits were assessed by various measures in two oral production tasks that involve phonological encoding: the percentage of nonword (phonological) errors in oral picture naming and the accuracy of word reading aloud with word comprehension ability regressed out. We found that the integrity of the left SLF in both the structural and diffusion tensor imaging measures consistently predicted the severity of phonological encoding impairment in the two phonological production tasks. Such effects of the left SLF on phonological production remained significant when a range of potential confounding factors were considered through partial correlation, including total lesion volume, demographic factors, lesions on phonological-relevant grey matter regions, or effects originating from the phonological perception or semantic processes. Our results therefore conclusively demonstrate the central role of the left SLF in phonological encoding in speech production.

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“…In this context, it is interesting to note that in 7-year-olds the arcuate fascicle and the superior longitudinal fascicle, connecting Broca's area and the temporal cortex, are still not fully matured (Brauer et al, 2011). This is relevant in so far as this fiber connection has been shown to support the processing of syntax (Wilson et al, 2011).…”

Section: Neural Substrate For Language Developmentmentioning

confidence: 97%