University of South Carolina.
University of Iceland.
J Cogn Neurosci. 2020 Feb;32(2):256-271. doi: 10.1162/jocn_a_01478. Epub 2019 Oct 9.
Left-hemisphere brain damage commonly affects patients' abilities to produce and comprehend syntactic structures, a condition typically referred to as "agrammatism." The neural correlates of agrammatism remain disputed in the literature, and distributed areas have been implicated as important predictors of performance, for example, Broca's area, anterior temporal areas, and temporo-parietal areas. We examined the association between damage to specific language-related ROIs and impaired syntactic processing in acute aphasia. We hypothesized that damage to the posterior middle temporal gyrus, and not Broca's area, would predict syntactic processing abilities. One hundred four individuals with acute aphasia (<20 days poststroke) were included in the study. Structural MRI scans were obtained, and all participants completed a 45-item sentence-picture matching task. We performed an ROI-based stepwise regression analyses to examine the relation between cortical brain damage and impaired comprehension of canonical and noncanonical sentences. Damage to the posterior middle temporal gyrus was the strongest predictor for overall task performance and performance on noncanonical sentences. Damage to the angular gyrus was the strongest predictor for performance on canonical sentences, and damage to the posterior superior temporal gyrus predicted noncanonical scores when performance on canonical sentences was included as a cofactor. Overall, our models showed that damage to temporo-parietal and posterior temporal areas was associated with impaired syntactic comprehension. Our results indicate that the temporo-parietal area is crucially implicated in complex syntactic processing, whereas the role of Broca's area may be complementary.
左半球脑损伤通常会影响患者生成和理解句法结构的能力,这种情况通常被称为“语法障碍”。语法障碍的神经相关性在文献中仍存在争议,分布式区域被认为是表现的重要预测因素,例如布罗卡区、前颞叶区域和颞顶叶区域。我们研究了特定语言相关 ROI 损伤与急性失语症中句法处理受损之间的关联。我们假设,后颞中回的损伤而不是布罗卡区的损伤将预测句法处理能力。104 名急性失语症患者(中风后<20 天)纳入研究。获得了结构 MRI 扫描,所有参与者都完成了 45 项句子-图片匹配任务。我们进行了基于 ROI 的逐步回归分析,以检查皮质脑损伤与对规范句和非规范句理解受损之间的关系。后颞中回的损伤是整体任务表现和非规范句表现的最强预测因素。角回的损伤是对规范句表现的最强预测因素,而当将规范句表现作为协变量时,后上颞叶的损伤预测了非规范句的分数。总的来说,我们的模型表明,颞顶叶和后颞叶区域的损伤与句法理解受损有关。我们的结果表明,颞顶叶区域在复杂句法处理中至关重要,而布罗卡区的作用可能是互补的。