Presentation

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Speech planning in classic picture naming vs. “dialogue” in children and adults

Poster A23 in Poster Session A, Thursday, October 6, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm EDT, Millennium Hall

Ebony Goldman¹, Sherine Bou Dargham¹, Marco Lai¹, Ellie Abrams¹, Jacqui Fallon¹, Ria Geguera¹, Miriam Hauptman¹, Alicia Parrish¹, Sarah F Phillips¹, Alejandra Reinoso¹, Liina Pylkkanen; ¹NYU

[INTRODUCTION] The picture naming task is common both as a clinical task and as a method to study the neural bases of speech production in the healthy brain. However, this task is not reflective of most naturally occurring productions, which tend to happen within a context, typically in dialogue as a response to someone else’s production. How the brain basis of confrontation picture naming compares to the planning of utterances in dialogue is not known. Here we used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to investigate neural activity associated with language production using the classic picture naming task as well as a minimal variant of the task, which made it more “dialogue” like. We assessed how neural activity is affected by the interactive context in children and adults. [METHODS] 50 adults and children participated in several language tasks within a larger experimental protocol designed to measure neural correlates associated with language comprehension and production at the lexical and phrasal levels in adults and children. The picture naming task elicited descriptions of colored objects either as nouns (cup) or as phrases (blue cup). The “dialogue” task involved responding to a computer-generated utterance. Specifically, an image of two objects was presented and the computer named one of them. The subject’s task was to name the other object. Again, the utterances were either single nouns or phrases, depending on the block and task instruction. Participants were grouped by age into three groups: children (7-12, n=18), teens (13-19, n=15), and adults (20+, n=17). We epoched data backwards from speech onset and conducted non-parametric cluster-based permutation tests in temporal and ventromedial prefrontal cortices, implicated in prior MEG studies of naming, as well as in Broca’s area, given its classic role in the neurobiology of language. [RESULTS] We observed a pattern of significant interactions of age by task. In adults, there was a robust sustained increase of activity for the dialogue task, while this increase was less pronounced in teenagers and absent in children, as detailed below. VMPFC: Robust, sustained increase for dialogue in adults, somewhat less sustained in teens, absent in children. Instead, simple picture naming elicited higher vmPFC activation in children. MTG: Robust, sustained increase for dialogue in adults. Subtle trend in teens in the same direction. Reverse pattern in children (late increase for simple picture naming), as in vmPFC. BROCA’S AREA: Increase for dialogue in adults. Brief effects in the opposite direction in teens and children. LATERALITY: These patterns were by and large bilateral. [CONCLUSION] The design of the dialogue task targeted neural correlates of speech planning in a more dialogue-like context than the simple picture naming task. We sought to characterize how the relevant neural activity changes across development. Our results reveal a sustained effect of task in the adult population and a pattern of maturation in which the vmPFC becomes adult-like the earliest, followed by middle temporal cortex, and with Broca’s area patterning last.

Topic Areas: Language Production, Development