Anterior temporal lobe is necessary for efficient lateralised processing of spoken word identity
Cope, T. E., Shtyrov, Y., MacGregor, L. J. , Holland, R. 
ORCID: 0000-0001-9865-0121, Pulvermüller, F., Rowe, J. B. & Patterson, K. (2020).
Anterior temporal lobe is necessary for efficient lateralised processing of spoken word identity.
Cortex, 126,
pp. 107-118.
doi: 10.1016/j.cortex.2019.12.025
Abstract
In the healthy human brain, the processing of language is strongly lateralised, usually to the left hemisphere, while the processing of complex non-linguistic sounds recruits brain regions bilaterally. Here we asked whether the anterior temporal lobes, strongly implicated in semantic processing, are critical to this special treatment of spoken words. Nine patients with semantic dementia (SD) and fourteen age-matched controls underwent magnetoencephalography and structural MRI. Voxel based morphometry demonstrated the stereotypical pattern of SD: severe grey matter loss restricted to the anterior temporal lobes, with the left side more affected. During magnetoencephalography, participants listened to word sets in which identity and meaning were ambiguous until word completion, for example PLAYED versus PLATE. Whereas left-hemispheric responses were similar across groups, patients demonstrated increased right hemisphere activity 174-294 msec after stimulus disambiguation. Source reconstructions confirmed recruitment of right-sided analogues of language regions in SD: atrophy of anterior temporal lobes was associated with increased activity in right temporal pole, middle temporal gyrus, inferior frontal gyrus and supramarginal gyrus. Overall, the results indicate that anterior temporal lobes are necessary for normal and efficient lateralised processing of word identity by the language network.
| Publication Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Additional Information: | © 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). |
| Publisher Keywords: | Language, Semantic, Anterior temporal lobe, Magnetoencephalography, Laterality |
| Subjects: | P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics R Medicine > RC Internal medicine > RC0321 Neuroscience. Biological psychiatry. Neuropsychiatry |
| Departments: | School of Health & Psychological Sciences > Language & Communication Science |
| SWORD Depositor: |
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution.
Download (1MB) | Preview
Export
Downloads
Downloads per month over past year
Metadata
MetadataActions (login required)
Admin Login