The left superior temporal gyrus is a shared substrate for auditory short-term memory and speech comprehension: evidence from 210 patients with stroke

By Alexander P. Leff, T. Schofield, Jennifer T. Crinion, Mohamed L. Seghier, A. Grogan, David W. Green, Cathy J. Price. Brain : a journal of neurology, 2009

787 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Competing theories of short-term memory function make specific predictions about the functional anatomy of auditory short-term memory and its role in language comprehension. We analysed high-resolution structural magnetic resonance images from 210 stroke patients and employed a novel voxel based analysis to test the relationship between auditory short-term memory and speech comprehension. Using digit span as an index of auditory short-term memory capacity we found that the structural integrity of a posterior region of the superior temporal gyrus and sulcus predicted auditory short-term memory capacity, even when performance on a range of other measures was factored out. We show that the integrity of this region also predicts the ability to comprehend spoken sentences. Our results therefore support cognitive models that posit a shared substrate between auditory short-term memory capacity and speech comprehension ability. The method applied here will be particularly useful for modelling structure–function relationships within other complex cognitive domains.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7ab10d5f30bd19b99af541055b4b5c85836df8c2

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

Citations in the corpus

Individual differences in rhythmic ability: Behavioral and neuroimaging investigations. (2012, positive): “This is consistent with neuropsychological studies indicating that lesions of posterior superior temporal gyrus (STG) are associated with auditory-verbal STM deficits (Leff et al., 2009; Markowitsch et al., 1999; Takayama, Kinomoto, & Nakamura, 2004), and neuroimaging data showing that gray matter d”
A Common Neural Substrate for Language Production and Verbal Working Memory (2011, neutral): “Although similar conclusions have been provided by neuropsychological (Martin & Saffran, 1997) and neuroimaging (Leff et al., 2009; Buchsbaum & DʼEsposito, 2008) investigations, the former is inferentially limited by the fact that brain damage in patient populations is rarely localized to a single…”
Rejuvenation of regeneration in the aging central nervous system (2012, neutral): “Third, use of the parabiotic systemuniquely tests the relevanceof systemic factors to regeneration in theCNSbypermitting exposure of aged tissues to blood-borne factors at physiologically relevant levels.”
Memory Deficits in Parkinson’s Disease Are Associated with Impaired Attentional Filtering and Memory Consolidation Processes (2023, unknown): “Since properly understanding spoken sentences may be involved in accessing to long-term storage of lexico-semantic representations of verbal information, the role of the left superior temporal gyrus in accessing long-term storage, especially for verbal information, is implicated [81].”