Time to bury the chisel: a continuous dorsal association tract system

The arcuate fasciculus may be subdivided into a tract directly connecting frontal and temporal lobes and a pair of indirect subtracts in which the fronto-temporal connection is mediated by connections to the inferior parietal lobe. This tripartition has been advanced as an improvement over the centuries-old consensus that the lateral dorsal association fibers form a continuous system with no discernible discrete parts. Moreover, it has been used as the anatomical basis for functional hypotheses regarding linguistic abilities. Ex hypothesi, damage to the indirect subtracts leads to deficits in the repetition of multi-word sequences, whereas damage to the direct subtract leads to deficits in the immediate reproduction of single multisyllabic words. We argue that this partitioning of the dorsal association tract system enjoys no special anatomical status, and the search for the anatomical substrates of linguistic abilities should not be constrained by it. Instead, the merit of any postulated partitioning should primarily be judged on the basis of whether it enlightens or obfuscates our understanding of the behavior of patients in which individual subtracts are damaged.