Mesulam Center for Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer's Disease, Department of Neurology, Northwestern University, 300 E Superior Street, Chicago, IL 60611, United States.
Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Adelphi University, 158 Cambridge Avenue, Garden City, NY 11530, United States.
Cereb Cortex. 2024 Jan 14;34(1). doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhad470.
Studies on the neural bases of sentence production have yielded mixed results, partly due to differences in tasks and participant types. In this study, 101 individuals with primary progressive aphasia (PPA) were evaluated using a test that required spoken production following an auditory prime (Northwestern Assessment of Verbs and Sentences-Sentence Production Priming Test, NAVS-SPPT), and one that required building a sentence by ordering word cards (Northwestern Anagram Test, NAT). Voxel-Based Morphometry revealed that gray matter (GM) volume in left inferior/middle frontal gyri (L IFG/MFG) was associated with sentence production accuracy on both tasks, more so for complex sentences, whereas, GM volume in left posterior temporal regions was exclusively associated with NAVS-SPPT performance and predicted by performance on a Digit Span Forward (DSF) task. Verb retrieval deficits partly mediated the relationship between L IFG/MFG and performance on the NAVS-SPPT. These findings underscore the importance of L IFG/MFG for sentence production and suggest that this relationship is partly accounted for by verb retrieval deficits, but not phonological loop integrity. In contrast, it is possible that the posterior temporal cortex is associated with auditory short-term memory ability, to the extent that DSF performance is a valid measure of this in aphasia.
句子产生的神经基础研究得出的结果喜忧参半，部分原因是任务和参与者类型的差异。在这项研究中，101 名原发性进行性失语症（PPA）患者接受了一项测试，该测试要求在听觉提示后进行口语生成（西北动词和句子评估-句子生成启动测试，NAVS-SPPT），以及一项需要通过排列单词卡片来构建句子的测试（西北变位词测试，NAT）。体素基形态计量学显示，左侧额下回/中回（L IFG/MFG）的灰质（GM）体积与两种任务的句子生成准确性相关，与复杂句子的相关性更强，而左侧颞后区的 GM 体积仅与 NAVS-SPPT 表现相关，并受数字跨度正向（DSF）任务表现的预测。动词检索缺陷部分介导了 L IFG/MFG 与 NAVS-SPPT 表现之间的关系。这些发现强调了 L IFG/MFG 对句子产生的重要性，并表明这种关系部分归因于动词检索缺陷，但与语音环路完整性无关。相比之下，颞后皮质可能与听觉短期记忆能力有关，在一定程度上，DSF 表现是失语症中这一能力的有效衡量标准。
