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Neural correlates of auditory naming to definition and environmental sounds: investigating common and task specific activation
Poster C3 in Poster Session C, Wednesday, October 25, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Angelique Volfart1, Katie L. McMahon1, Catherine Liégeois-Chauvel2, Vitória Piai3,4, Greig de Zubicaray1; 1Queensland University of Technology, 2University of Pittsburgh, 3Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior, 4Radboud University Medical Center
The neural bases of conceptual-to-lexical retrieval processes during language production tasks are debated. Many studies have pointed to the involvement of ventral anterior temporal regions in accessing conceptual knowledge but most have employed picture naming tasks. Auditory naming tasks have been less frequently used, despite their importance for understanding the extent to which conceptual processing may differ when no visual input is present. We therefore investigated conceptual-to-lexical retrieval with fMRI using two auditory paradigms, requiring names to be retrieved from either verbal definitions or environmental sounds. 14 healthy participants (recruitment still in progress, target 25 participants) completed the two continuous auditory naming tasks while fMRI data were acquired (continuous multi-band EPI acquisition; TR = 1s). To isolate conceptual-to-lexical retrieval processes from articulatory/motor processes, participants first listened to the auditory input and had to delay their verbal production until a visual cue appeared. Experimental trials in each task were contrasted with control trials, in which the participant listened to scrambled sentences (definition naming) or white noise (sound naming) and were required to respond with a single word (“noise”). A conjunction analysis at the whole-brain level showed BOLD signal increase common to both tasks in the left precentral gyrus, left posterior inferior temporal / fusiform gyrus, bilateral superior temporal gyrus, left lingual gyrus, left thalamus, right cerebellum and left supplementary motor cortex. We also found BOLD signal decreases common to both tasks in the right angular gyrus, precuneus and middle frontal gyrus. Task-specific activations were observed for definition naming in the left anterior middle temporal gyrus (MTG) and superior temporal sulcus (STS), posterior inferior temporal gyrus, bilateral cerebellum, left superior frontal gyrus, superior occipital gyrus, and bilateral superior parietal lobule, and for sound naming in the bilateral auditory cortex, bilateral supplementary motor cortex, left thalamus and right precentral gyrus. We did not observe any significant common or specific activation in ventral anterior temporal regions although task-specific activation was observed in the left anterior MTG/STS for definition naming. Our findings confirm that auditory naming of verbal and non-verbal stimuli activates a similar left perisylvian network of regions to picture naming tasks. While naming to definition involved a wider network of left-lateralized regions, including the anterior MTG and STS associated with conceptual preparation, naming environmental sounds recruited a more bilateral auditory network, supporting different pathways depending on the input type and a likely richer activation of conceptual representations for naming to definition. While preliminary, these results raise questions about a common anterior temporal region for processing “cross-modal” conceptual representations during spoken word production.
Topic Areas: Language Therapy, Meaning: Discourse and Pragmatics