Presentation
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Neural Mechanisms of Song vs Speech Production: Insights from Aphasia and Intracranial Recording
Poster D6 in Poster Session D, Wednesday, October 25, 4:45 - 6:30 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Alexis L. Pracar1, Maria V. Ivanova1, Anaïs Llorens4,5,6, Nicoletta Biondo1,2, Brooke R. Staveland4, David R. Quiroga-Martinez4,7, Peter Brunner8, Robert T. Knight1,4, Nina F. Dronkers1,3; 1University of California, Berkeley, 2Basque Center on Cognition, Brain, and Language, 3University of California, Davis, 4Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California, Berkeley, 5Université de Franche-Comté, 6Université de Paris, 7Center for Music in the Brain, Aarhus University & The Royal Academy of Music, 8Washington University School of Medicine, St Louis
Despite extensive exploration into the neural mechanisms of language, there is no conclusive explanation for why language expression through song is spared relative to speech in certain individuals with aphasia. To investigate this phenomenon, the current study takes an innovative approach in examining how the brain expresses language through song versus speech. We will explore behavioral patterns and the structural and functional neuroanatomy of singing, merging evidence from two distinct patient cohorts and two different methodologies: individuals with post-stroke aphasia (n=30), and neurosurgical patients without aphasia with implanted electrodes (n=20). Both cohorts will be tested on the same set of speech and language tasks with different processing demands: motor speech, word retrieval, and a sentence priming task. Each task will be presented in both spoken and sung modalities. In participants with aphasia, we will analyze error patterns and inspect damaged neural structures associated with specific performance profiles, while in the neurosurgical cohort, the analysis will shift to temporal dynamics and sites of activity underlying each task. The novel combination of behavioral and lesion analysis in people with aphasia and intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) in neurosurgical patients will provide unique insights into the behavioral and neural mechanisms of singing. First, people with aphasia will be tested on the three tasks to determine how singing affects their production of single words and sentences. Previous studies have documented improvements with singing, but it is not clear whether these gains are due to overcoming motor speech deficits or linguistic processing disorders such as word retrieval and syntax. The different tasks will evaluate potential singing benefits within each of these domains. In addition, we will analyze high-resolution structural MRI and diffusion-weighted imaging from this group to define the cortical regions and white matter integrity that differentiate people with aphasia with and without preserved singing. Finally, participants with surgically-implanted intracranial EEG electrodes for pre-surgical evaluation of pharmacologically-refractory epilepsy will be studied while singing and speaking. iEEG measures brain activity with millimeter accuracy and millisecond temporal precision allowing us to define spoken and sung network dynamics and investigate both left and right hemisphere activity during singing and speaking. Thus, the combination of MRI and iEEG with detailed behavioral analysis will provide novel behavioral, neuroanatomical, and electrophysiological information on how spoken and sung language interact and diverge. We will present preliminary results from both the iEEG and the aphasia cohort.
Topic Areas: Language Production, Multisensory or Sensorimotor Integration