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Motivation and design of a study on the neural correlates of verb production in chronic post-stroke aphasia
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Poster A58 in Poster Session A, Tuesday, October 24, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Marianne Casilio1, Alexander M Swiderski2,3, Jeffrey P Johnson2, Gerasimos Fergadiotis4, William D Hula2,3; 1Vanderbilt University Medical Center, 2VA Pittsburgh Healthcare System, 3University of Pittsburgh, 4Portland State University
Spoken language production is a rapid and integrative system, where concepts are activated (semantic processing) and mapped to a word form (lexical processing) with its associated grammatical markers (morphosyntactic processing) and sound representations (phonological processing)[1]. However, there remains substantial debate as to whether lexical and morphosyntactic systems rely on distinct regions within the language network. Lesion-based research in aphasia shows left temporal regions are necessary for lexical processing and left frontal regions are critical for morphosyntactic processing[2], yet functional neuroimaging studies of healthy speakers suggests that processing is distributed throughout the network regardless of lexical or morphosyntactic demands[3]. Verb production tasks may shed light on this debate because verbs are thought to exist at the nexus of lexical and morphosyntactic processing[4]. However, most verb production tasks have not undergone rigorous psychometric validation, thereby limiting the degree to which robust inferences can be made regarding the cognitive constructs underlying the response to items. We recently applied item response theory (IRT), an advanced psychometric framework, to a commonly used verb production task (Verb Naming Test [VNT])[5] in 107 participants with chronic post-stroke aphasia and found the VNT displayed adequate fit and strong reliability to a unidimensional construct[6] that was predominantly aligned with lexical processing[7]. This study in-progress aims to leverage our IRT modeling framework to evaluate the neural correlates of verb production using the VNT. To date, we have enrolled 41 participants with chronic post-stroke aphasia across two recruitment sites (VA Pittsburgh Healthcare System, Portland State University) as part of a larger, ongoing research study. Participants were administered the VNT, among numerous other behavioral tasks, by a speech-language pathologist who also scored the responses. Structural neuroimaging has been acquired for 21 of the enrolled participants, and lesion delineation, completed following previously published methods[8], is in progress. By the time of our sandbox series poster, we project to have recruited ~60 participants, ~30 of which we anticipate will have lesion-delineated structural neuroimaging. For our presentation, we will present our interim findings descriptively and, if adequately powered, will discuss preliminary results from our planned main analysis, voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping[9]. Here, IRT-based VNT scores will serve as the dependent variable. Controlling covariates will include lesion volume, presence of a concomitant motor speech disorder, and performance on a nonlinguistic semantic memory measure, the latter two of which are potential confounders of naming performance[10,11]. In line with our prior work[7] and lesion studies of word production[12], we predict that scores on the VNT will correlate predominantly with left temporal regions, lending further support to the view that verb production is most associated with lexical processing. [1]Levelt et al. Behav Brain Sci. 1999;22(1):1-38. [2]Matchin et al. Brain. 2022;145(11):3916-3930. [3]Hu et al. Cereb Cortex. 2022:bhac350.[4]Gordon, Dell. Cogn. Sci. 2003;27(1):1-40. [5]Cho-Reyes, Thompson. Aphasiology. 2012;26(10):1250-1277. [6]Fergadiotis et al. JSLHR. 2023;0:1-22. [7]Casilio et al. Clinical Aphasiology Conference. 2023. [8]Wilson et al. Brain. 2023;146:1021-39. [9]Bates et al. Nat Neurosci. 2003;6(5):448-450. [10]Schwartz et al. Brain. 2012;135(12):3799-3814. [11]Bird et al. Brain Lang. 2000;72(3):246-309. [12]Alyahya et al. NeuroImage Clin. 2018;18:215-30.
Topic Areas: Disorders: Acquired, Language Production