DISTRIBUTION OF CORTICAL NEURAL NETWORKS INVOLVED IN WORD COMPREHENSION AND WORD RETRIEVAL

作者：Richard G. Wise, François Chollet, Uri Hadar, Karl John Friston, ELAINE HOFFNER, Richard S. J. Frackowiak · 发表于：Brain · 年份：1991 · DOI：10.1093/brain/114.4.1803 · 被引用次数：888 · 研究领域：Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism

Six normal volunteers were studied with positron emission tomography to identify the cortical neural networks that participate in the processing of single words. Activity-related changes in regional cerebral blood flow were measured consecutively on 6 occasions in each subject, 2 while the subject was at rest and 4 while single word language tasks were being performed. The data from each subject were standardized for brain shape and size, reconstructed parallel to the intercommissural line, normalized for global flow differences, and then averaged for each activation condition across the 6 subjects. Significant areas of change in rCBF (P less than 0.05, with appropriate Bonferroni corrections) between task and rest conditions were displayed with reference to the coordinates of a standard neuroanatomical atlas. We have demonstrated that categorical judgements on heard pairs of real words activate neural networks along both superior temporal gyri, but with an anatomical distribution no different from that seen when the subjects listened to nonwords: the tasks would appear to be very different in cognitive demands but not in terms of the distribution of activation. However, during a verb generation task that involved thinking of verbs appropriate to heard nouns presented at a slow rate, the only temporal region activated was the left posterior superior temporal association cortex (Wernicke's area). Further analysis showed that whereas activation in other superior temporal region...