Neural systems supporting lexical search guided by letter and semantic category cues: A self-paced overt response fMRI study of verbal fluency
By Rasmus M. Birn, Lauren E. Kenworthy, L. Case, Rachel Caravella, Tyler B. Jones, Peter A. Bandettini, Alex Martin. NeuroImage, 2009
378 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Verbal fluency tasks have been widely used to evaluate language and executive control processes in the human brain. FMRI studies of verbal fluency, however, have used either silent word generation (which provides no behavioral measure) or cued generation of single words in order to contend with speech-related motion artifacts. In this study, we use a recently developed paradigm design to investigate the neural correlates of verbal fluency during overt, free recall, word generation so that performance and brain activity could be evaluated under conditions that more closely mirror standard behavioral test demands. We investigated verbal fluency to both letter and category cues in order to evaluate differential involvement of specific frontal and temporal lobe sites as a function of retrieval cue type, as suggested by previous neuropsychological and neuroimaging investigations. In addition, we incorporated both a task switching manipulation and an automatic speech condition in order to modulate the demand placed on executive functions. We found greater activation in the left hemisphere during category and letter fluency tasks, and greater right hemisphere activation during automatic speech. We also found that letter and category fluency tasks were associated with differential involvement of specific regions of the frontal and temporal lobes. These findings provide converging evidence that letter and category fluency performance is dependent on partially distinct neural circuitry. They also provide strong evidence that verbal fluency can be successfully evaluated in the MR environment using overt, self-paced, responses.
Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental and Educational Psychology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fc30379896d7402e5d07d1651a1a8cfc56ed2d64
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Cognitive Neuroscience
In Developmental and Educational Psychology
Citations in the corpus
- A review and synthesis of the first 20 years of PET and fMRI studies of heard speech, spoken language and reading (2012, background): “…or when distracting semantic information was added, activation for word retrieval was also reported in the medial superior frontal cortex (Birn et al., 2010), the left pars orbitalis in the ventral inferior frontal cortex (de Zubicaray and McMahon, 2009; Saur et al., 2008), the left…”