Department of Neurosurgery, Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Berlin, Germany; Brain Language Laboratory, Department of Philosophy and Humanities, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany.
Center for Language and Cognition (CLCG), University of Groningen, Groningen, the Netherlands.
Neuropsychologia. 2024 Aug 13;201:108940. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2024.108940. Epub 2024 Jun 12.
Navigated Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (nTMS) is commonly used to causally identify cortical regions involved in language processing. Combining tractography with nTMS has been shown to increase induced error rates by targeting stimulation of cortical terminations of white matter fibers. According to functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data, bilateral cortical areas connected by the arcuate fasciculus (AF) have been implicated in the processing of transitive compared to unergative verbs. To test this connection between transitivity and bilateral perisylvian regions, we administered a tractography-based inhibitory nTMS protocol during action naming of finite transitive (The man reads) and unergative (The man sails) verbs. After tracking the left and right AF, we stimulated the cortical terminations of the tract in frontal, parietal and temporal regions in 20 neurologically healthy native speakers of German. Results revealed that nTMS induced more errors during transitive compared to unergative verb naming when stimulating the left (vs right) AF terminations. This effect was specific to the left temporal terminations of the AF, whereas no differences between the two verb types were identified when stimulating inferior parietal and frontal AF terminations. Induced errors for transitive verbs over left temporal terminations mostly manifested as access errors (i.e., hesitations). Given the inhibitory nature of our nTMS protocol, these results suggest that temporal regions of the left hemisphere play a crucial role in argument structure processing. Our findings align with previous data on the role of left posterior temporal regions in language processing and by providing further evidence from a language production experiment using tractography-based inhibitory nTMS.
经颅磁刺激导航（nTMS）常用于确定参与语言处理的皮质区域。结合示踪技术和 nTMS 已经显示出，通过靶向刺激皮质纤维的终止部位，可以增加诱导的错误率。根据功能磁共振成像（fMRI）数据，双侧通过弓状束（AF）连接的皮质区域被牵连到传递动词与非传递动词的处理中。为了检验这种传递性与双侧颞上回之间的联系，我们在 20 名神经健康的母语为德语的德国人中进行了基于示踪的抑制性 nTMS 方案，用于完成动作命名（有限传递动词：The man reads 和非传递动词：The man sails）。在追踪左、右 AF 之后，我们在额、顶和颞区刺激纤维的皮质终止部位。结果表明，当刺激左（与右）AF 终止部位时，与非传递动词命名相比，nTMS 在传递动词命名时会引起更多的错误。这种效应是左颞 AF 终止部位特有的，而在刺激下顶和额 AF 终止部位时，两种动词类型之间没有差异。在左颞 AF 终止部位刺激时，传递动词引起的错误主要表现为访问错误（即犹豫）。考虑到我们的 nTMS 方案具有抑制性，这些结果表明，左半球的颞叶区域在句子结构处理中起着至关重要的作用。我们的发现与左后颞叶区域在语言处理中的作用的先前数据一致，并通过使用基于示踪的抑制性 nTMS 的语言产生实验提供了进一步的证据。
