The neostriatum and response selection in overt sentence production: an fMRI study

A number of premotor and prefrontal brain areas have been recently shown to play a significant role in response selection in overt sentence production. These areas are anatomically connected to the basal ganglia, a set of subcortical structures that has been traditionally involved in response selection across behavioral domains. The putamen and the caudate, the two major inputs to the basal ganglia, have been shown to undertake motor- as well as non-motor-related selection operations in language processing. Here we investigate the role of these basal ganglia structures in sentence repetition and generation in healthy adults. Although sentence generation is known to activate prefrontal and premotor cortical areas that reciprocally connect with these two neostriatal structures, their specific contributions are not known. We present evidence suggesting that that the putamen undertakes articulation-related aspects across tasks, while the caudate selectively supports selection processes in sentence generation.