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Nina F Dronkers - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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the neural architecture of the Language Comprehension network converging evidence from lesion and connectivity analyses
Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, 2011Co-Authors: And U Turken, Nina F DronkersAbstract:While traditional models of Language Comprehension have focused on the left posterior temporal cortex as the neurological basis for Language Comprehension, lesion and functional imaging studies indicate the involvement of an extensive network of cortical regions. However, the full extent of this network and the white matter pathways that contribute to it remain to be characterized. In an earlier voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping analysis of data from aphasic patients (Dronkers et al., 2004), several brain regions in the left hemisphere were found to be critical for Language Comprehension: the left posterior middle temporal gyrus (MTG), the anterior part of Brodmann’s area 22 in the superior temporal gyrus (anterior STG/BA22), the posterior superior temporal sulcus (STS) extending into Brodmann’s area 39 (STS/BA39), the orbital part of the inferior frontal gyrus (BA47) and the middle frontal gyrus (BA46). Here, we investigated the white matter pathways associated with these regions using diffusion tensor imaging from healthy subjects. We also used resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging data to assess the functional connectivity profiles of these regions. Fiber tractography and functional connectivity analyses indicated that the left MTG, anterior STG/BA22, STS/BA39 and BA47 are part of a richly interconnected network that extends to additional frontal, parietal and temporal regions in the two hemispheres. The inferior occipito-frontal fasciculus, the arcuate fasciculus and the middle and inferior longitudinal fasciculi, as well as transcallosal projections via the tapetum were found to be the most prominent white matter pathways bridging the regions important for Language Comprehension. The left posterior MTG showed a particularly extensive structural and functional connectivity pattern which is consistent with the severity of the impairments associated with MTG lesions and which suggests a central role for this region in Language Comprehension.
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neural correlates of arithmetic and Language Comprehension a common substrate
Neuropsychologia, 2007Co-Authors: Juliana V Baldo, Nina F DronkersAbstract:There is debate as to the relationship between mathematical ability and Language. Some research has suggested that common processes underlie arithmetic and grammar while other research has suggested that these are distinct processes. The current study aimed to address this issue in a large group of 68 left hemisphere stroke patients who were all tested on analogous arithmetic and Language Comprehension measures. The behavioral data revealed a significant correlation between performance on the Comprehension and arithmetic measures, although a subset of patients showed a dissociation in performance on the two tasks. To determine the brain regions critical for performance on each measure, patients' lesions were analyzed using Voxel-based Lesion Symptom Mapping. Arithmetic was associated with a small number of foci, with the most significant region located in the left inferior parietal lobule (Brodmann areas 39 and 40). Comprehension was associated with a larger number of brain regions, most extensively in the left middle and superior temporal gyri. There was also overlap between the arithmetic and Comprehension maps in a number of regions, such as the inferior frontal gyrus. Our findings suggest that arithmetic and Language Comprehension are mediated by partially overlapping brain networks. These findings are discussed in light of previous work on the neural basis of arithmetic ability and its relationship to Language.
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lesion analysis of the brain areas involved in Language Comprehension
Cognition, 2004Co-Authors: Nina F Dronkers, David P Wilkins, Robert D Van Valin, Brenda B Redfern, Jeri J JaegerAbstract:The cortical regions of the brain traditionally associated with the Comprehension of Language are Wernicke's area and Broca's area. However, recent evidence suggests that other brain regions might also be involved in this complex process. This paper describes the opportunity to evaluate a large number of brain-injured patients to determine which lesioned brain areas might affect Language Comprehension. Sixty-four chronic left hemisphere stroke patients were evaluated on 11 subtests of the Curtiss-Yamada Comprehensive Language Evaluation - Receptive (CYCLE-R; Curtiss, S., & Yamada, J. (1988). Curtiss-Yamada Comprehensive Language Evaluation. Unpublished test, UCLA). Eight right hemisphere stroke patients and 15 neurologically normal older controls also participated. Patients were required to select a single line drawing from an array of three or four choices that best depicted the content of an auditorily-presented sentence. Patients' lesions obtained from structural neuroimaging were reconstructed onto templates and entered into a voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping (VLSM; Bates, E., Wilson, S., Saygin, A. P., Dick, F., Sereno, M., Knight, R. T., & Dronkers, N. F. (2003). Voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping. Nature Neuroscience, 6(5), 448-450.) analysis along with the behavioral data. VLSM is a brain-behavior mapping technique that evaluates the relationships between areas of injury and behavioral performance in all patients on a voxel-by-voxel basis, similar to the analysis of functional neuroimaging data. Results indicated that lesions to five left hemisphere brain regions affected performance on the CYCLE-R, including the posterior middle temporal gyrus and underlying white matter, the anterior superior temporal gyrus, the superior temporal sulcus and angular gyrus, mid-frontal cortex in Brodmann's area 46, and Brodmann's area 47 of the inferior frontal gyrus. Lesions to Broca's and Wernicke's areas were not found to significantly alter Language Comprehension on this particular measure. Further analysis suggested that the middle temporal gyrus may be more important for Comprehension at the word level, while the other regions may play a greater role at the level of the sentence. These results are consistent with those seen in recent functional neuroimaging studies and offer complementary data in the effort to understand the brain areas underlying Language Comprehension.
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lesion analysis of the brain areas involved in Language Comprehension
Cognition, 2004Co-Authors: Nina F Dronkers, David P Wilkins, Brenda B Redfern, Robert D Van Valin, Jeri J JaegerAbstract:The cortical regions of the brain traditionally associated with the Comprehension of Language are Wernicke’s area and Broca’s area. However, recent evidence suggests that other brain regions might also be involved in this complex process. This paper describes the opportunity to evaluate a large number of brain-injured patients to determine which lesioned brain areas might affect Language Comprehension. Sixty-four chronic left hemisphere stroke patients were evaluated on 11 subtests of the Curtiss– Yamada Comprehensive Language Evaluation – Receptive (CYCLE-R; Curtiss, S., & Yamada, J. (1988). Curtiss –Yamada Comprehensive Language Evaluation. Unpublished test, UCLA). Eight right hemisphere stroke patients and 15 neurologically normal older controls also participated. Patients were required to select a single line drawing from an array of three or four choices that best depicted the content of an auditorily-presented sentence. Patients’ lesions obtained from structural neuroimaging were reconstructed onto templates and entered into a voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping (VLSM; Bates, E., Wilson, S., Saygin, A. P., Dick, F., Sereno, M., Knight, R. T., & Dronkers, N. F. (2003). Voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping. Nature Neuroscience, 6(5), 448– 450.) analysis along with the behavioral data. VLSM is a brain – behavior mapping technique that evaluates the relationships between areas of injury and behavioral performance in all patients on a voxel-by-voxel basis, similar to the analysis of functional neuroimaging data. Results indicated that lesions to five left hemisphere brain regions affected performance on the CYCLE-R, including the posterior middle temporal gyrus and underlying white matter, the anterior superior temporal gyrus, the superior temporal sulcus and angular gyrus, mid-frontal cortex in Brodmann’s area 46, and Brodmann’s area 47 of the inferior frontal gyrus. Lesions to Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas were not found to significantly alter Language Comprehension on this particular measure. Further analysis
Peter Hagoort - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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frequency based segregation of syntactic and semantic unification during online sentence level Language Comprehension
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 2015Co-Authors: Marcel C M Bastiaansen, Peter HagoortAbstract:During sentence level Language Comprehension, semantic and syntactic unification are functionally distinct operations. Nevertheless, both recruit roughly the same brain areas spatially overlapping networks in the left frontotemporal cortex and happen at the same time in the first few hundred milliseconds after word onset. We tested the hypothesis that semantic and syntactic unification are segregated by means of neuronal synchronization of the functionally relevant networks in different frequency ranges: gamma 40 Hz and up for semantic unification and lower beta 10-20 Hz for syntactic unification. EEG power changes were quantified as participants read either correct sentences, syntactically correct though meaningless sentences syntactic prose, or sentences that did not contain any syntactic structure random word lists. Other sentences contained either a semantic anomaly or a syntactic violation at a critical word in the sentence. Larger EEG gamma-band power was observed for semantically coherent than for semantically anomalous sentences. Similarly, beta-band power was larger for syntactically correct sentences than for incorrect ones. These results confirm the existence of a functional dissociation in EEG oscillatory dynamics during sentence level Language Comprehension that is compatible with the notion of a frequency-based segregation of syntactic and semantic unification.
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Prediction during natural Language Comprehension
Cerebral Cortex, 2015Co-Authors: Roel M Willems, Annabel D. Nijhof, Stefan L. Frank, Peter Hagoort, Antal Van Den Bosch, Antal Van Den BoschAbstract:The notion of prediction is studied in cognitive neuroscience with increasing intensity. We investigated the neural basis of 2 distinct aspects of word prediction, derived from information theory, during story Comprehension. We assessed the effect of entropy of next-word probability distributions as well as surprisal A computational model determined entropy and surprisal for each word in 3 literary stories. Twenty-four healthy participants listened to the same 3 stories while their brain activation was measured using fMRI. Reversed speech fragments were presented as a control condition. Brain areas sensitive to entropy were left ventral premotor cortex, left middle frontal gyrus, right inferior frontal gyrus, left inferior parietal lobule, and left supplementary motor area. Areas sensitive to surprisal were left inferior temporal sulcus ("visual word form area"), bilateral superior temporal gyrus, right amygdala, bilateral anterior temporal poles, and right inferior frontal sulcus. We conclude that prediction during Language Comprehension can occur at several levels of processing, including at the level of word form. Our study exemplifies the power of combining computational linguistics with cognitive neuroscience, and additionally underlines the feasibility of studying continuous spoken Language materials with fMRI.
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unification of speaker and meaning in Language Comprehension an fmri study
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 2009Co-Authors: Peter Hagoort, Cathelijne M J Y Tesink, Jan K Buitelaar, Karl Magnus Petersson, Jos J A Van Berkum, Danielle Van Den BrinkAbstract:When interpreting a message, a listener takes into account several sources of linguistic and extralinguistic information. Here we focused on one particular form of extralinguistic information, certain speaker characteristics as conveyed by the voice. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we examined the neural structures involved in the unification of sentence meaning and voice-based inferences about the speaker's age, sex, or social background. We found enhanced activation in the inferior frontal gyrus bilaterally (BA 45/47) during listening to sentences whose meaning was incongruent with inferred speaker characteristics. Furthermore, our results showed an overlap in brain regions involved in unification of speaker-related information and those used for the unification of semantic and world knowledge information [inferior frontal gyrus bilaterally (BA 45/47) and left middle temporal gyrus (BA 21)]. These findings provide evidence for a shared neural unification system for linguistic and extralinguistic sources of information and extend the existing knowledge about the role of inferior frontal cortex as a crucial component for unification during Language Comprehension.
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neural correlates of pragmatic Language Comprehension in autism spectrum disorders
Brain, 2009Co-Authors: Cathelijne M J Y Tesink, Jan K Buitelaar, Karl Magnus Petersson, R J Van Der Gaag, Cornelis C Kan, Indira Tendolkar, Peter HagoortAbstract:Difficulties with pragmatic aspects of communication are universal across individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). Here we focused on an aspect of pragmatic Language Comprehension that is relevant to social interaction in daily life: the integration of speaker characteristics inferred from the voice with the content of a message. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we examined the neural correlates of the integration of voice-based inferences about the speaker's age, gender or social background, and sentence content in adults with ASD and matched control participants. Relative to the control group, the ASD group showed increased activation in right inferior frontal gyrus (RIFG; Brodmann area 47) for speaker-incongruent sentences compared to speaker-congruent sentences. Given that both groups performed behaviourally at a similar level on a debriefing interview outside the scanner, the increased activation in RIFG for the ASD group was interpreted as being compensatory in nature. It presumably reflects spill-over processing from the Language dominant left hemisphere due to higher task demands faced by the participants with ASD when integrating speaker characteristics and the content of a spoken sentence. Furthermore, only the control group showed decreased activation for speaker-incongruent relative to speaker-congruent sentences in right ventral medial prefrontal cortex (vMPFC; Brodmann area 10), including right anterior cingulate cortex (ACC; Brodmann area 24/32). Since vMPFC is involved in self-referential processing related to judgments and inferences about self and others, the absence of such a modulation in vMPFC activation in the ASD group possibly points to atypical default self-referential mental activity in ASD. Our results show that in ASD compensatory mechanisms are necessary in implicit, low-level inferential processes in spoken Language understanding. This indicates that pragmatic Language problems in ASD are not restricted to high-level inferential processes, but encompass the most basic aspects of pragmatic Language processing.
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event related brain potentials reflect discourse referential ambiguity in spoken Language Comprehension
Psychophysiology, 2003Co-Authors: Jos J A Van Berkum, Peter Hagoort, Colin M Brown, Pienie ZwitserloodAbstract:In two experiments, we explored the use of event-related brain potentials to selectively track the processes that establish reference during spoken Language Comprehension. Subjects listened to stories in which a particular noun phrase like "the girl" either uniquely referred to a single referent mentioned in the earlier discourse, or ambiguously referred to two equally suitable referents. Referentially ambiguous nouns ("the girl" with two girls introduced in the discourse context) elicited a frontally dominant and sustained negative shift in brain potentials, emerging within 300-400 ms after acoustic noun onset. The early onset of this effect reveals that reference to a discourse entity can be established very rapidly. Its morphology and distribution suggest that at least some of the processing consequences of referential ambiguity may involve an increased demand on memory resources. Furthermore, because this referentially induced ERP effect is very different from that of well-known ERP effects associated with the semantic (N400) and syntactic (e.g., P600/SPS) aspects of Language Comprehension, it suggests that ERPs can be used to selectively keep track of three major processes involved in the Comprehension of an unfolding piece of discourse.
Lars Meyer - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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the neural oscillations of speech processing and Language Comprehension state of the art and emerging mechanisms
European Journal of Neuroscience, 2018Co-Authors: Lars MeyerAbstract:Neural oscillations subserve a broad range of functions in speech processing and Language Comprehension. On the one hand, speech contains-somewhat-repetitive trains of air pressure bursts that occur at three dominant amplitude modulation frequencies, physically marking the linguistically meaningful progressions of phonemes, syllables and intonational phrase boundaries. To these acoustic events, neural oscillations of isomorphous operating frequencies are thought to synchronise, presumably resulting in an implicit temporal alignment of periods of neural excitability to linguistically meaningful spectral information on the three low-level linguistic description levels. On the other hand, speech is a carrier signal that codes for high-level linguistic meaning, such as syntactic structure and semantic information-which cannot be read from stimulus acoustics, but must be acquired during Language acquisition and decoded for Language Comprehension. Neural oscillations subserve the processing of both syntactic structure and semantic information. Here, I synthesise a mapping from each linguistic processing domain to a unique set of subserving oscillatory mechanisms-the mapping is plausible given the role ascribed to different oscillatory mechanisms in different subfunctions of cortical information processing and faithful to the underlying electrophysiology. In sum, the present article provides an accessible and extensive review of the functional mechanisms that neural oscillations subserve in speech processing and Language Comprehension.
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The neural oscillations of speech processing and Language Comprehension: State of the art and emerging mechanisms
European Journal of Neuroscience, 2017Co-Authors: Lars MeyerAbstract:Neural oscillations subserve a broad range of functions in speech processing and Language Comprehension. On the one hand, speech contains—somewhat—repetitive trains of air pressure bursts that occur at three dominant amplitude modulation frequencies, physically marking the linguistically meaningful progressions of phonemes, syllables, and intonational phrase boundaries. To these acoustic events, neural oscillations of isomorphous operating frequencies are thought to synchronize, presumably resulting in an implicit temporal alignment of periods of neural excitability to linguistically meaningful spectral information on the three low-level linguistic description levels. On the other hand, speech is a carrier signal that codes for high-level linguistic meaning, such as syntactic structure and semantic information—which cannot be read from stimulus acoustics, but must be acquired during Language acquisition and decoded for Language Comprehension. Neural oscillations subserve the processing of both syntactic structure and semantic information. Here, I synthesize a mapping from each linguistic processing domain to a unique set of subserving oscillatory mechanisms—the mapping is plausible given the role ascribed to different oscillatory mechanisms in different sub-functions of cortical information processing and faithful to the underlying electrophysiology. In sum, the present article provides an accessible and extensive review of the functional mechanisms that neural oscillations subserve in processing and Language Comprehension. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
Jeri J Jaeger - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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lesion analysis of the brain areas involved in Language Comprehension
Cognition, 2004Co-Authors: Nina F Dronkers, David P Wilkins, Robert D Van Valin, Brenda B Redfern, Jeri J JaegerAbstract:The cortical regions of the brain traditionally associated with the Comprehension of Language are Wernicke's area and Broca's area. However, recent evidence suggests that other brain regions might also be involved in this complex process. This paper describes the opportunity to evaluate a large number of brain-injured patients to determine which lesioned brain areas might affect Language Comprehension. Sixty-four chronic left hemisphere stroke patients were evaluated on 11 subtests of the Curtiss-Yamada Comprehensive Language Evaluation - Receptive (CYCLE-R; Curtiss, S., & Yamada, J. (1988). Curtiss-Yamada Comprehensive Language Evaluation. Unpublished test, UCLA). Eight right hemisphere stroke patients and 15 neurologically normal older controls also participated. Patients were required to select a single line drawing from an array of three or four choices that best depicted the content of an auditorily-presented sentence. Patients' lesions obtained from structural neuroimaging were reconstructed onto templates and entered into a voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping (VLSM; Bates, E., Wilson, S., Saygin, A. P., Dick, F., Sereno, M., Knight, R. T., & Dronkers, N. F. (2003). Voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping. Nature Neuroscience, 6(5), 448-450.) analysis along with the behavioral data. VLSM is a brain-behavior mapping technique that evaluates the relationships between areas of injury and behavioral performance in all patients on a voxel-by-voxel basis, similar to the analysis of functional neuroimaging data. Results indicated that lesions to five left hemisphere brain regions affected performance on the CYCLE-R, including the posterior middle temporal gyrus and underlying white matter, the anterior superior temporal gyrus, the superior temporal sulcus and angular gyrus, mid-frontal cortex in Brodmann's area 46, and Brodmann's area 47 of the inferior frontal gyrus. Lesions to Broca's and Wernicke's areas were not found to significantly alter Language Comprehension on this particular measure. Further analysis suggested that the middle temporal gyrus may be more important for Comprehension at the word level, while the other regions may play a greater role at the level of the sentence. These results are consistent with those seen in recent functional neuroimaging studies and offer complementary data in the effort to understand the brain areas underlying Language Comprehension.
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lesion analysis of the brain areas involved in Language Comprehension
Cognition, 2004Co-Authors: Nina F Dronkers, David P Wilkins, Brenda B Redfern, Robert D Van Valin, Jeri J JaegerAbstract:The cortical regions of the brain traditionally associated with the Comprehension of Language are Wernicke’s area and Broca’s area. However, recent evidence suggests that other brain regions might also be involved in this complex process. This paper describes the opportunity to evaluate a large number of brain-injured patients to determine which lesioned brain areas might affect Language Comprehension. Sixty-four chronic left hemisphere stroke patients were evaluated on 11 subtests of the Curtiss– Yamada Comprehensive Language Evaluation – Receptive (CYCLE-R; Curtiss, S., & Yamada, J. (1988). Curtiss –Yamada Comprehensive Language Evaluation. Unpublished test, UCLA). Eight right hemisphere stroke patients and 15 neurologically normal older controls also participated. Patients were required to select a single line drawing from an array of three or four choices that best depicted the content of an auditorily-presented sentence. Patients’ lesions obtained from structural neuroimaging were reconstructed onto templates and entered into a voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping (VLSM; Bates, E., Wilson, S., Saygin, A. P., Dick, F., Sereno, M., Knight, R. T., & Dronkers, N. F. (2003). Voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping. Nature Neuroscience, 6(5), 448– 450.) analysis along with the behavioral data. VLSM is a brain – behavior mapping technique that evaluates the relationships between areas of injury and behavioral performance in all patients on a voxel-by-voxel basis, similar to the analysis of functional neuroimaging data. Results indicated that lesions to five left hemisphere brain regions affected performance on the CYCLE-R, including the posterior middle temporal gyrus and underlying white matter, the anterior superior temporal gyrus, the superior temporal sulcus and angular gyrus, mid-frontal cortex in Brodmann’s area 46, and Brodmann’s area 47 of the inferior frontal gyrus. Lesions to Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas were not found to significantly alter Language Comprehension on this particular measure. Further analysis
Evelina Fedorenko - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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the domain general multiple demand md network does not support core aspects of Language Comprehension a large scale fmri investigation
The Journal of Neuroscience, 2020Co-Authors: Evgeniia Diachek, Evelina Fedorenko, Idan Blank, Matthew Siegelman, Josef AffourtitAbstract:Aside from the Language-selective left-lateralized frontotemporal network, Language Comprehension sometimes recruits a domain-general bilateral frontoparietal network implicated in executive functions: the multiple demand (MD) network. However, the nature of the MD network's contributions to Language Comprehension remains debated. To illuminate the role of this network in Language processing in humans, we conducted a large-scale fMRI investigation using data from 30 diverse word and sentence Comprehension experiments (481 unique participants [female and male], 678 scanning sessions). In line with prior findings, the MD network was active during many Language tasks. Moreover, similar to the Language-selective network, which is robustly lateralized to the left hemisphere, these responses were stronger in the left-hemisphere MD regions. However, in contrast with the Language-selective network, the MD network responded more strongly (1) to lists of unconnected words than to sentences, and (2) in paradigms with an explicit task compared with passive Comprehension paradigms. Indeed, many passive Comprehension tasks failed to elicit a response above the fixation baseline in the MD network, in contrast to strong responses in the Language-selective network. Together, these results argue against a role for the MD network in core aspects of sentence Comprehension, such as inhibiting irrelevant meanings or parses, keeping intermediate representations active in working memory, or predicting upcoming words or structures. These results align with recent evidence of relatively poor tracking of the linguistic signal by the MD regions during naturalistic Comprehension, and instead suggest that the MD network's engagement during Language processing reflects effort associated with extraneous task demands.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Domain-general executive processes, such as working memory and cognitive control, have long been implicated in Language Comprehension, including in neuroimaging studies that have reported activation in domain-general multiple demand (MD) regions for linguistic manipulations. However, much prior evidence has come from paradigms where Language interpretation is accompanied by extraneous tasks. Using a large fMRI dataset (30 experiments/481 participants/678 sessions), we demonstrate that MD regions are engaged during Language Comprehension in the presence of task demands, but not during passive reading/listening, conditions that strongly activate the frontotemporal Language network. These results present a fundamental challenge to proposals whereby linguistic computations, such as inhibiting irrelevant meanings, keeping representations active in working memory, or predicting upcoming elements, draw on domain-general executive resources.
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the domain general multiple demand md network does not support core aspects of Language Comprehension a large scale fmri investigation
bioRxiv, 2020Co-Authors: Evgeniia Diachek, Idan Blank, Matthew Siegelman, Josef Affourtit, Evelina FedorenkoAbstract:Aside from the Language-selective left-lateralized fronto-temporal network, Language Comprehension sometimes additionally recruits a domain-general bilateral fronto-parietal network implicated in executive functions: the multiple demand (MD) network. However, the nature of the MD network9s contributions to Language Comprehension remains debated. To illuminate the role of this network in Language processing, we conducted a large-scale fMRI investigation using data from 30 diverse word and sentence Comprehension experiments (481 unique participants, 678 scanning sessions). In line with prior findings, the MD network was active during many Language tasks. Moreover, similar to the Language-selective network, which is robustly lateralized to the left hemisphere, these responses were stronger in the left-hemisphere MD regions. However, in stark contrast with the Language-selective network, the MD network responded more strongly (i) to lists of unconnected words than to sentences, and critically, (ii) in paradigms with an explicit task compared to passive Comprehension paradigms. In fact, many passive Comprehension tasks failed to elicit a response above the fixation baseline in the MD network, in contrast to strong responses in the Language-selective network. In tandem, these results argue against a role for the MD network in core aspects of sentence Comprehension like inhibiting irrelevant meanings or parses, keeping intermediate representations active in working memory, or predicting upcoming words or structures. These results align with recent evidence of relatively poor tracking of the linguistic signal by the MD regions during naturalistic Comprehension, and instead suggest that the MD network9s engagement during Language processing likely reflects effort associated with extraneous task demands.
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the role of domain general cognitive control in Language Comprehension
Frontiers in Psychology, 2014Co-Authors: Evelina FedorenkoAbstract:What role does domain-general cognitive control play in understanding linguistic input? Although much evidence has suggested that domain-general cognitive control and working memory resources are sometimes recruited during Language Comprehension, many aspects of this relationship remain elusive. For example, how frequently do cognitive control mechanisms get engaged when we understand Language? And is this engagement necessary for successful Comprehension? I here a) review recent brain imaging evidence for the neural separability of the brain regions that support high-level linguistic processing vs. those that support domain-general cognitive control abilities; b) define the space of possibilities for the relationship between these sets of brain regions; and c) review the available evidence that constrains these possibilities to some extent. I argue that we should stop asking whether domain-general cognitive control mechanisms play a role in Language Comprehension, and instead focus on characterizing the division of labor between the cognitive control brain regions and the more functionally specialized Language regions.
