Poster B77, Tuesday, August 20, 2019, 3:15 – 5:00 pm, Restaurant Hall
Distinct Speech Production and Speech Perception Regions in the Human Cerebellum: A Neuroimaging Meta-Analyses
Daniel R Lametti1, Sarah Bobbit1, Jeremy I Skipper2;1Acadia University, 2University College London
The cerebellum plays a known role in human speech motor control, but its role in speech perception and language comprehension remains somewhat of a mystery. Recent neuroimaging meta-analyses report a functional topology of activation in the cerebellum related to language use. However, these meta-analyses are based on a small number of studies and they fail to illuminate the roles of the cerebellum in both language use and the subprocesses that define it. Here we conduct a large scale and specific meta-analysis to test the prediction that the cerebellum contains distinct circuits for action and perception in speech processing. To do this, we collated all available neuroimaging studies reporting cerebellar activity in the "neurosynth" database prior to July 2018 that overlapped with studies in the PubMed database related to 20 speech and language-related terms and their Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) equivalents. We then went through the resulting N=2168 studies by hand to find those specifically associated with speech production/articulation (N=189), active speech perception (e.g. perception tasks with a motor response; N=283), and passive speech perception (e.g. perception tasks without a motor response; N=74). These were used to conduct ALE meta-analyses. Cerebellar clusters from meta-analyses were also used in a cortical co-activation analysis with the full set of N=14,371 studies in the neurosynth database. The resulting networks were functionally labelled using a text-mining procedure on the articles associated with the networks. Whereas, production and active speech studies strongly overlapped in the cerebellum, speech production was nearly completely dissociable from passive speech perception, even at lower thresholds. Clusters in the cerebellum active during passive speech perception co-activated with a number of distributed and dissociable cortical networks, ranging from those labelled as sensorimotor (including, e.g., primary motor and somatosensory cortex and the SMA) to those associated with semantic processing (e.g., posterior MTG and IFG). The results suggest that the cerebellum contains distinct circuits for the production and perception of speech, operating at various levels of the perceptual system. The cerebellum has a simple circuitry that has previously been causally linked with prediction and timing. Separable circuits for action and perception in speech may work to maintain the predictive timing of language production, reception, and the sub-processes that constitute these components of language.
Themes: Speech Perception, Language Production
Method: Functional Imaging