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NEUROFUNCTIONAL CORRELATES OF MORPHOSYNTACTIC PROCESSING AND THEMATIC ROLE ASSIGNMENT
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Poster D38 in Poster Session D, Wednesday, October 25, 4:45 - 6:30 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Sabrina Beber1, Giorgia Bontempi1, Gabriele Miceli1, Marco Tettamanti2; 1Center for Mind/Brain Sciences (CIMeC), University of Trento, 2University of Milano-Bicocca
INTRODUCTION The left ventro-lateral prefrontal cortex and temporo-parietal areas have been traditionally associated with language processing. Recent lesion-symptom studies in persons with aphasia (PWA) post-stroke showed that lesions in the left temporo-parietal cortex, but surprisingly not in the left prefrontal cortex, affect the comprehension of semantically reversible sentences (e.g., The child is kissed by the mother). This result challenges the traditional view that left prefrontal regions are critical for sentence comprehension. However, most studies focused on thematic roles (TR; i.e., who does what to whom), and failed to consider morphosyntactic processes (MS; i.e., inflections, agreement), that are also critical for sentence processing. In a systematic literature review and coordinate-based meta-analysis, we analyzed papers on the neurofunctional correlates of language processing in PWA. METHODS We included all papers published until October 2022, that applied a lesion-symptom mapping analysis on samples of PWA with TR/MS deficits following a brain lesion caused by stroke, neurodegeneration, or gliomas. A whole-brain, coordinate-based meta-analysis on lesion-symptom correlation studies was carried out using the GingerALE software (version 3.0.2). RESULTS The literature search initially yielded 2199 papers, 43 of which were considered eligible for the systematic review on the correlation between brain lesions in PWA and TR/MS impairments. The 43 eligible papers reported a total of 50 experiments. Of these, 25 investigated tasks that required TR assignment, whereas 15 investigated MS-related tasks; 10 experiments investigated both processes. With respect to the processing modalities, 27 experiments investigated comprehension, 20 investigated production, and the remaining experiments investigated both modalities. Twenty-seven of the 43 eligible papers also reported voxel-based anatomical coordinates and were thus included in our meta-analysis. The coordinate-based convergence of the effects reported across these 27 papers (corresponding to 28 experiments focusing on TR and/or MS) yielded significant (cluster-level p<0.05 FWE corrected) meta-analysis clusters in the left IFG, MFG, insula, precentral and postcentral gyri, MTG, STG, and SMG. A finer-grained meta-analysis directly comparing MS versus TR processing showed a greater involvement of the left IFG for MS, and of the left STG/SMG for TR, however only at an exploratory significance level (p<0.05 uncorrected). CONCLUSION The amount of literature sampled in our review and meta-analysis is quite limited. As a further concern, most studies on TR disorders focused on sentence comprehension and most studies on MS difficulties investigated sentence production, thus confounding the types of processes with the processing modalities. In addition, there is substantial heterogeneity in the experimental paradigms used to assess the two sets of processes and in the etiologies considered, which may differently affect linguistic phenotype and ease of damage compensation. Although these lesion-symptom mapping results must be taken with great caution, they inform future experimental choices aimed at disentangling the functional neuroanatomy of TR and MS processes.
Topic Areas: Disorders: Acquired, Morphology