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A detailed functional characterization of cerebellar language-responsive brain areas
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Poster E87 in Poster Session E, Thursday, October 26, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Colton Casto1, Benjamin Lipkin1, Hannah Small1, Anila D'Mello2,3, Evelina Fedorenko1,4; 1Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2University of Texas Southwestern, 3University of Texas at Dallas, 4Harvard University
Complementing early research on the cerebellum’s contributions to motor control, evidence has been accumulating for a role of the cerebellum in human cognition, including language (Stoodley & Schmahmann 2009; 2010; Mariën et al., 2014; Guell et al., 2018). Moreover, recent ‘deep neuroscience’ approaches where large amounts of naturalistic-cognition data are collected from each individual have uncovered a complex mosaic whereby many distinct areas tile the cerebellum, each exhibiting a distinct pattern of functional correlations with cortical networks (Habas et al., 2009; Buckner et al., 2011). Here, we first leveraged a large dataset of individuals (n=806 participants) performing an extensively validated language ‘localizer' task—based on a contrast between reading or listening to sentences vs. a perceptually similar but meaningless control condition (nonwords or speech in a foreign language) (Fedorenko et al., 2010)— to search for language-responsive areas within the cerebellum. Three such areas were discovered in the right cerebellum (localized to lobule VI/Crus I, Crus I/Crus II, and lobule VIII), all showing strong and highly replicable responses during language processing. Next, using data from n=82 diverse fMRI experiments (343 experimental conditions encompassing an array of perceptual, motor, cognitive, and social tasks) conducted on subsets of these 800+ individuals, we richly characterize the functional profiles of these right-cerebellar language-responsive areas, and their left-cerebellar homotopic areas, for completeness. These experiments include both non-linguistic tasks (n=114 conditions) and linguistic manipulations (n=223 conditions), allowing us to probe both selectivity for language and sensitivity to particular aspects of language. We find that all three areas show strong responses to language—across both auditory and visual modalities—relative to diverse perceptual, motor, and cognitive non-linguistic tasks, ruling out numerous hypotheses about the nature of these areas’ contributions to language. Further, all three areas show robust sensitivity to linguistic combinatorial processing, exhibiting stronger responses during sentence processing compared to the processing of word lists, mirroring the functional profile of the cortical language areas. In tandem, these results suggest that the right cerebellum contains three areas that functionally resemble the fronto-temporal cortical language network in both selectivity for language and sensitivity to combinatorial linguistic processing. These cerebellar language components work in concert with the cortical language network to support our linguistic ability.
Topic Areas: Speech Perception,