Overt speech feasibility using continuous functional magnetic resonance imaging: Isolation of areas involved in...

To avoid motion artifacts, almost all speech-related functional magnetic resonance imagings (fMRIs) are performed covertly to detect language activations. This method may be difficult to execute, especially by patients with brain tumors, and does not allow the identification of phonological areas. Here, we aimed to evaluate overt task feasibility. Thirty-three volunteers participated in this study. They performed two functional sessions of covert and overt generation of a short sentence semantically linked with a word. Three main contrasts were performed: Covert and Overt for the isolation of language-activated areas, and Overt > Covert for the isolation of the motor cortical activation of speech. fMRI data preprocessing was performed with and without unwarping, and with and without regression of movement parameters as confounding variables. All types of results were compared to each other. For the Overt contrast, Dice coefficients showed strong overlap between each pair of types of results: 0.98 for the pair with and without unwarping, and 0.9 for the pair with and without movement parameter regression. The Overt > Covert contrast allowed isolation of motor laryngeal activations with high statistical reliability and revealed the right-lateralized temporal activity related to acoustic feedback. Overt speaking during magnetic resonance imaging induced few artifacts and did not significantly affect the results, allowing the identification of areas involved in primary motor control and prosodic regulation of speech. Unwarping and motion artifact regression in the postprocessing step, seem to not be necessary. Changes in lateralization of cortical activity by overt speech shall be explored before using these tasks for presurgical mapping.