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A study of syntactic processing in aphasia II: neurological aspects
David Caplan1, Gloria Waters, David Kennedy
1Neuropsychology Laboratory, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA 02114, USA. dcaplan@partners.org
Brain and Language
|September 26, 2006
Summary
Left hemisphere strokes impact language comprehension in aphasia. Brain lesion location, not size, predicts syntactic processing deficits, suggesting flexible neural organization for language.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Psycholinguistics
- Neurolinguistics
Background:
- Aphasia following left hemisphere stroke often impairs language processing.
- Syntactic comprehension deficits are a key feature, but their neural basis is debated.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the relationship between lesion location in the left hemisphere and deficits in syntactic comprehension in aphasic patients.
- To explore the neural underpinnings of syntactic processing using neuroimaging techniques.
Main Methods:
- Studied 42 aphasic patients and 25 controls on syntactic structure interpretation (passives, relative clauses, reflexives) using enactment, sentence-picture matching, and grammaticality judgment tasks.
- Acquired magnetic resonance (MR) and 5-deoxyglucose positron emission tomography (FDG PET) data.
- Correlated lesion measures (MR) and metabolic activity (PET) in regions of interest (ROIs) with behavioral performance.
Main Results:
- Lesion extent in both perisylvian and non-perisylvian ROIs predicted syntactic comprehension performance.
- Behavioral performance varied greatly even with similar lesion sizes, and lesion sizes differed significantly for patients with comparable performance.
- Individual variability in lesion location was a key factor in predicting comprehension abilities.
Conclusions:
- The neural representation for syntactic processing is not fixed and varies across individuals.
- Language comprehension relies on distributed neural networks where specific lesion locations, rather than overall lesion size, are critical predictors of functional deficits.
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