The effect of cortical and subcortical lesions on spontaneous expression of memory-encoded and emotionally infused information: Evidence for a role of the ventral stream

The Role of the Right Hemisphere White Matter Tracts in Chronic Aphasic Patients After Damage of the Language Tracts in the Left Hemisphere

“…Speech fluency was measured by the speech rate (SR) in two tasks (a) the Stroke Story (SS) test, which requires the patient to describe orally her/his stroke incident, and (b) the Cookie Theft Picture (CTP) test, which requires the description of a picture depicting a “cookie theft” event. SR was calculated as the total number of words divided by the total duration of speech (words/minute), as previously implemented in studies investigating narrative abilities in patients with aphasia (see for example: Andreetta et al, 2012 ; Efthymiopoulou et al, 2017 ; DeDe and Salis, 2020 ; Gordon and Clough, 2020 ; Kasselimis et al, 2020 ) and patients with primary progressive aphasia (PPA; see for example: Knibb et al, 2009 ; Wilson et al, 2010 ). Patients were instructed to speak with no restrictions with respect to narration time.…”

Investigating Gray and White Matter Structural Substrates of Sex Differences in the Narrative Abilities of Healthy Adults

“…Linguistic elements of speech rate (words per minute), mean length of utterances (MLU), number of function words, frequency of nouns (as number of nouns per 100 words) and number frequency of verbs (as number of verbs per 100 words), were calculated according to the speech annotation method Quantitative Production Analysis (QPA), proposed by Saffran et al (1989) and adapted for Greek by Varkanitsa (2012). For the speech rate calculation, total duration of the audio files was used for each participant, while for all the other linguistic metrics, only the first 100 words were analyzed based on the QPA updated methodology as proposed by Rochon et al (2000) and has been implemented in other studies (see for example Efthymiopoulou et al, 2017). In order to calculate MLU, speech samples were segmented into utterances using primarily semantic, syntactic and intonational criteria in accordance with speech annotation methodology for Greek proposed by Varkanitsa (2012), which we have previously implemented in patients with aphasia and healthy speakers (Angelopoulou et al, 2018).…”

“…One aspect of the current study that should not be overlooked is the emotional component of the language task used (for a discussion on the importance of elicitation tasks requiring narration of emotionally infused information, see Efthymiopoulou et al, 2017). Previous social studies have emphasized the existence of sex differences regarding expression of emotion (see Golombok and Fivush, 1994, for a review).…”

Extreme Capsule is a Bottleneck for Ventral Pathway

“…A more detailed analysis revealed that insufficiency of speech speed was not related to damages to putamen, and since the EmC fibers are followed by putamen as the main target, this insufficiency is probably the consequence of damage to the EmC. [53] The use of visual and auditory feedbacks in speech increases activity in the anterior insula regions and 47 Brodmann and 37 Brodmann bilaterally. The communication between hemispheres in these areas are made by the corpus callosum and the communications within a hemisphere are made by the EmC.…”