The Neural Basis of Reversible Sentence Comprehension: Evidence from Voxel-based Lesion Symptom Mapping in Aphasia

Thothathiri, Malathi; Kimberg, Daniel Y.; Schwartz, Myrna F.

doi:10.1162/jocn_a_00118

Cited by 125 publications

(160 citation statements)

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“…These require understanding and updating abstract representations of shared knowledge, intention, and social goals, as well as sociocultural norms. Furthermore, voxel based lesion symptom mapping has demonstrated that damage to the TPC is associated with impairments in using syntactical information in reversible sentence comprehension (“the man serves the woman,” or “the woman serves the man”) (Thotharthiri, Kimberg & Schwartz, 2012; see also, Dronkers, Wilkins, Van Valin, Redfern & Jaeger, 2004; Race, Ochfeld, Leigh, & Hillis, 2012), a task that requires the use of context to understand the relationships between objects and people.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Converging evidence from fMRI and aphasia that the left temporoparietal cortex has an essential role in representing abstract semantic knowledge

Skipper-Kallal

Mirman

Olson

2015

Cortex

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While the neural underpinnings of concrete semantic knowledge have been studied extensively, abstract conceptual knowledge remains enigmatic. We present two experiments that provide converging evidence for the involvement of key regions in the temporoparietal cortex (TPC) in abstract semantic representations. First, we carried out a neuroimaging study in which participants thought deeply about abstract and concrete words. A functional connectivity analysis revealed a cortical network, including portions of the TPC, that showed coordinated activity specific to abstract word processing. In a second experiment, we tested participants with lesions involving the left TPC on a spoken-to-written word matching task using abstract and concrete target words presented in arrays of related or unrelated distractors. The results revealed an interaction between concreteness and relatedness: participants with TPC lesions were significantly less accurate for abstract words presented in related arrays than in unrelated arrays, but exhibited no effect of relatedness for concrete words. These results confirm that the TPC plays an important role in abstract concept representation and that it is part of a larger network of functionally cooperative regions needed for abstract word processing.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Converging evidence from fMRI and aphasia that the left temporoparietal cortex has an essential role in representing abstract semantic knowledge

Skipper-Kallal

Mirman

Olson

2015

Cortex

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“…On the one hand, investigations of patients with brain damage have revealed that lesions to many different parts of the language system can cause similar syntactic comprehension difficulties. Such regions include Broca’s region in the inferior frontal gyrus (e.g., Caramazza & Zurif, 1976; Schwartz, Saffran, & Marin, 1980; Caplan & Futter, 1986; Zurif, Swinney, Prather, Solomon, & Bushell, 1993; Grodzinsky, 2000), the arcuate fasciculus and/or the extreme capsule (e.g., Caramazza & Zurif, 1976; Papoutsi, Stamatakis, Griffiths, Marslen-Wilson, & Tyler, 2011; Rolheiser, Stamatakis, & Tyler, 2011; Tyler et al , 2011; Wilson et al , 2011), posterior temporal regions (e.g., Samuels & Benson, 1979; Selnes, Knopman, Niccum, Rubens, & Larson, 1983; Basso, Lecours, Moraschini, & Vanier, 1985; Tramo, Baynes, & Volpe, 1988; Caplan et al , 1996; Bastiaanse & Edwards, 2004; Wilson & Saygin, 2004; Amici et al , 2007; Tyler et al , 2011; Thothathiri, Kimberg, & Schwartz, 2012), and anterior temporal regions (e.g., Dronkers, Wilkins, Van Valin, Redfern, & Jaeger, 1994; Dronkers, Wilkins, Van Valin, Redfern, & Jaeger, 2004; Magnusdottir et al , 2013). For instance, lesions in all of these regions can impair the interpretation of semantically reversible sentences, such as , whose meanings (who did what to whom) depend on their syntactic form (i.e., word order, function words, and functional morphology).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Syntactic processing is distributed across the language system

et al. 2016

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Language comprehension recruits an extended set of regions in the human brain. Is syntactic processing localized to a particular region or regions within this system, or is it distributed across the entire ensemble of brain regions that support high-level linguistic processing? Evidence from aphasic patients is more consistent with the latter possibility: damage to many different language regions and to white-matter tracts connecting them has been shown to lead to similar syntactic comprehension deficits. However, brain imaging investigations of syntactic processing continue to focus on particular regions within the language system, often parts of Broca’s area and regions in the posterior temporal cortex. We hypothesized that, whereas the entire language system is in fact sensitive to syntactic complexity, the effects in some regions may be difficult to detect because of the overall lower response to language stimuli. Using an individual-subjects approach to localizing the language system, shown in prior work to be more sensitive than traditional group analyses, we indeed find responses to syntactic complexity throughout this system, consistent with the findings from the neuropsychological patient literature. We speculate that such distributed nature of syntactic processing could perhaps imply that syntax is inseparable from other aspects of language comprehension (e.g., lexico-semantic processing), in line with current linguistic and psycholinguistic theories and evidence. Neuroimaging investigations of syntactic processing thus need to expand their scope to include the entire system of high-level language processing regions in order to fully understand how syntax is instantiated in the human brain.

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“…7 Both functional imaging and lesion data suggest extensive cortical involvement in sentence comprehension [8][9][10][11] ; however, these studies have not attempted to separate the combinatorial processes unique to multiword comprehension from executive control processes. On the basis of several prior functional imaging studies, [12][13][14][15][16] we hypothesized that temporal lobe regions inferior to the classic Wernicke area may contain a critical site for combinatorial processing of phrase-level and sentence-level language.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lesion localization of speech comprehension deficits in chronic aphasia

et al. 2017

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Objective: Voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping (VLSM) was used to localize impairments specific to multiword (phrase and sentence) spoken language comprehension.Methods: Participants were 51 right-handed patients with chronic left hemisphere stroke. They performed an auditory description naming (ADN) task requiring comprehension of a verbal description, an auditory sentence comprehension (ASC) task, and a picture naming (PN) task. Lesions were mapped using high-resolution MRI. VLSM analyses identified the lesion correlates of ADN and ASC impairment, first with no control measures, then adding PN impairment as a covariate to control for cognitive and language processes not specific to spoken language.Results: ADN and ASC deficits were associated with lesions in a distributed frontal-temporal parietal language network. When PN impairment was included as a covariate, both ADN and ASC deficits were specifically correlated with damage localized to the mid-to-posterior portion of the middle temporal gyrus (MTG).Conclusions: Damage to the mid-to-posterior MTG is associated with an inability to integrate multiword utterances during comprehension of spoken language. Impairment of this integration process likely underlies the speech comprehension deficits characteristic of Wernicke aphasia. The notion that speech comprehension depends on the posterior left superior temporal gyrus (pSTG) 1 is a persistent one, despite 3 major problems with this model. First, evidence suggests that the principal role of the pSTG is in processing phonologic information for short-term memory and speech production tasks.2-4 Second, language comprehension depends on a broadly distributed network spanning frontal, temporal, and parietal lobes. 5,6 Thus, any model that proposes a strict localization of language comprehension to the pSTG can no longer be seen as tenable. Third, speech comprehension is not a unitary process, but rather encompasses speech sound recognition, retrieval of individual word meanings, and various processes supporting integration of meaning across multiple words. All of these components also depend on the ability to maintain information in short-term memory and on general executive control processes. Given this complexity, which process or processes, if any, are likely to be localized to the superior temporal region?Multiword comprehension requires the rapid combination of individual word meanings, guided by syntactic information.7 Both functional imaging and lesion data suggest extensive cortical involvement in sentence comprehension [8][9][10][11] ; however, these studies have not attempted to separate the combinatorial processes unique to multiword comprehension from executive control processes. On the basis of several prior functional imaging studies, [12][13][14][15][16] we hypothesized that temporal lobe regions inferior to the classic Wernicke area may contain a critical site for combinatorial processing of phrase-level and sentence-level language. We tested this hypothesis

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The Neural Basis of Reversible Sentence Comprehension: Evidence from Voxel-based Lesion Symptom Mapping in Aphasia

Cited by 125 publications

References 52 publications

Converging evidence from fMRI and aphasia that the left temporoparietal cortex has an essential role in representing abstract semantic knowledge

Converging evidence from fMRI and aphasia that the left temporoparietal cortex has an essential role in representing abstract semantic knowledge

Syntactic processing is distributed across the language system

Lesion localization of speech comprehension deficits in chronic aphasia

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