Background Processing of linguistic negation has been associated to inhibitory brain mechanisms. However, no study has tapped this link via multimodal measures in patients with core inhibitory alterations, a critical approach to reveal direct neural correlates and potential disease markers. Methods Here we examined oscillatory, neuroanatomical, and functional connectivity signatures of a recently reported Go/No-go negation task in healthy controls and behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) patients, typified by primary and generalized inhibitory disruptions. To test for specificity, we also recruited persons with Alzheimer's disease (AD), a disease involving frequent but nonprimary inhibitory deficits. Results In controls, negative sentences in the No-go condition distinctly involved frontocentral delta (2–3 Hz) suppression, a canonical inhibitory marker. In bvFTD patients, this modulation was selectively abolished and significantly correlated with the volume and functional connectivity of regions supporting inhibition (e.g. precentral gyrus, caudate nucleus, and cerebellum). Such canonical delta suppression was preserved in the AD group and associated with widespread anatomo-functional patterns across non-inhibitory regions. Discussion These findings suggest that negation hinges on the integrity and interaction of spatiotemporal inhibitory mechanisms. Moreover, our results reveal potential neurocognitive markers of bvFTD, opening a new agenda at the crossing of cognitive neuroscience and behavioral neurology.
Behavioral embodied research shows that words evoking limb-specific meanings can affect responses performed with the corresponding body part. However, no study has explored this phenomenon's neural dynamics under implicit processing conditions, let alone by disentangling its conceptual and motoric stages. Here, we examined whether the blending of hand actions and manual action verbs, relative to nonmanual action verbs and nonaction verbs, modulates electrophysiological markers of semantic integration (N400) and motor-related cortical potentials during a lexical decision task. Relative to both other categories, manual action verbs involved reduced posterior N400 amplitude and greater modulations of frontal motor-related cortical potentials. Such effects overlapped in a window of ∼380–440 msec after word presentation and ∼180 msec before response execution, revealing the possible time span in which both semantic and action-related stages reach maximal convergence. These results allow refining current models of motor–language coupling while affording new insights on embodied dynamics at large.
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