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Neuromotor control of reiterated speech in adults, typically developing children and children with Childhood Apraxia of Speech (CAS)
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Poster E2 in Poster Session E, Thursday, October 26, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Ioanna Anastasopoulou1, Kirrie Ballard, Peter Wilson, Douglas Cheyne, Pascal Van Lieshout; 1Macquarie University,School of Psychological Sciences, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, 2University of Sydney, 3Australian Catholic University, 4University of Toronto,Department of Speech-Language Pathology, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 5Hospital for Sick Children Research Institute, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Introduction. Neuroimaging protocols for mapping of expressive speech centres employ several standard speech tasks including object naming, rhyming, and covert word production (Agarwal et al., 2019). These tasks reliably elicit activation of distributed speech centres in prefrontal, precentral and cingulate motor cortices and are widely used for presurgical mapping and in research studies of language production. In the present study we used an alternative speech protocol employing reiterated productions of simple disyllabic nonwords (Anastasopoulou et al., 2022). Here we show that this task elicits highly focal activations of speech motor control areas centred on the precentral gyrus and adjacent portions of the middle frontal gyrus. Methods:Participants. 11 healthy adults (mean 35.5 years, range 19-64), 19 typically developing children (TD) (mean age 11.0 years, range 7-14) and 7 children with CAS (mean age 8.5 years, range 6-12). Assessments. All children were tested for nonverbal IQ, hearing, speech, expressive, receptive language and oral- motor development, fine and gross motor skills, and handedness. Neuroimaging. KIT/Yokogawa 160 channel MEG, whole cortex, axial first order gradiometers. Acoustic and speech movement recordings. A MEG-compatible tracking system (Alves et al., 2016) used tracking coils placed at mid-sagittal positions on the lips, tongue body, and jaw. Time-aligned speech acoustics were recorded in an auxiliary channel of the MEG setup at the same sample rate as the MEG recordings. Stimuli. (1) Reiterated productions of disyllabic sequences V1CV2 /ipa/ and /api/ at normal and faster rates. Each participant repeated all tasks for ten trials, with each trial lasting approximately 10 seconds. (2) Self-paced manual button press with right index finger at a rate of about 1 per 2 seconds for 300 sec (about 150 trials). Analyses. For each speech production task, the continuously recorded MEG signals were segmented into 15-second epochs, consisting of -10 to +5 seconds with respect to the speech trial onset. Button press trials were segmented into 1.5 second epochs consisting of -0.5 to 1.0 seconds with respect to the button press. Source analyses were performed with SAM beamformer (pseudo-t; Jobst et al., 2018). Group statistics were performed with permutation tests (p < 0.05). Results. (1) Speech clusters were located immediately ventral to hand motor cortex identified with the button press task. (2) Speech clusters were left lateralized in adults, bilateral in TDs, and right lateralized in CAS. (3) Speech was associated with beta band desynchronisation in adults and TDs but not in children with CAS, who showed theta band synchronisation during speech. Conclusions. The functional relevance of the middle region of the precentral gyrus to expressive speech motor control has been highlighted in several recent reviews of lesion, electrocorticographic, and functional neuroimaging evidence (Gordon et al., 2023; Hickok et al., 2023; Jensen et al., 2023; Silva et al., 2022). The present results show highly focal activations of this region were elicited using a reiterated nonword speech task. Group differences in lateralization and frequency band indicate that this task may have utility in the study of speech motor control during normal and atypical development of expressive speech.
Topic Areas: Language Production, Speech Motor Control