Performance in picture naming and word comprehension: evidence for common neuronal substrates from intraoperative...

Correlations of naming ability and performance in the Token Test are known from aphasia; however, the mechanisms underlying these correlations are unclear. Naming tasks are commonly used in intraoperative mapping for identification of cortical areas involved in language processing. In the present study, we measured performance in an elementary Token Test task, i.e., single word comprehension, during electrical stimulation of cortical sites at which this stimulation previously had disturbed the naming process. It was found that at about half of the sites at which naming could be disturbed electrical stimulation also led to disturbances in Token Test performance, indicating that there are common neural structures critical for performance in both tasks. These findings are discussed in terms of a multilayered semantic network in which the level of the simultaneous binding of features into concepts and the level of units that are organized with respect to semantic relations may be disturbed separately.