Department of Psychology, Educational Sciences and Human Movement, University of Palermo, Viale delle Scienze, Ed. 15, 90128, Palermo, Italy.
NeuroTeam Life and Science, Palermo, Italy.
Sci Rep. 2021 Mar 31;11(1):7313. doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-86625-0.
Anatomo functional studies of prism adaptation (PA) have been shown to modulate a brain frontal-parieto-temporal network, increasing activation of this network in the hemisphere ipsilateral to the side of prism deviation. This effect raises the hypothesis that left prism adaptation, modulating frontal areas of the left hemisphere, could modify subjects' performance on linguistic tasks that map on those areas. To test this hypothesis, 51 healthy subjects participated in experiments in which leftward or rightward prism adaptation were applied before the execution of a phonemic fluency task, i.e., a task with strict left hemispheric lateralization onto frontal areas. Results showed that leftward PA significantly increased the number of words produced whereas rightward PA did not significantly modulate phonemic fluency. The present findings document modulation of a language ability following prism adaptation. The results could have a huge clinical impact in neurological populations, opening new strategies of intervention for language and executive dysfunctions.
棱镜适应（PA）的解剖功能研究表明，它可以调节大脑额顶颞网络，增加对棱镜偏差侧对侧半球的网络激活。这一效应提出了这样一种假设，即左棱镜适应，调节左半球的额区，可以改变在这些区域上映射的语言任务的表现。为了验证这一假设，51 名健康受试者参与了实验，在执行语音流畅性任务之前，即严格左半球偏侧到额区的任务之前，应用了左或右棱镜适应。结果表明，左棱镜适应显著增加了产生的单词数量，而右棱镜适应则没有显著调节语音流畅性。本研究结果记录了棱镜适应后语言能力的调节。这些结果在神经学人群中可能具有巨大的临床影响，为语言和执行功能障碍开辟了新的干预策略。
