Reliability of single-subject neural activation patterns in speech production tasks.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Frankford SA
PROVIDER: S-EPMC7781091 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:While numerous studies have explored single-word naming, few have evaluated the behavioral and neural correlates of more naturalistic language, like connected speech, which we produce every day. Here, in a retrospective analysis of 120 participants at least six months following left hemisphere stroke, we evaluated the distribution of word errors (paraphasias) and associated brain damage during connected speech (picture description) and object naming. While paraphasias in connected speech and naming shared underlying neural substrates, analysis of the distribution of paraphasias suggested that lexical-semantic load is likely reduced during connected speech. Using voxelwise lesion-symptom mapping (VLSM), we demonstrated that verbal (real word: semantically related and unrelated) and sound (phonemic and neologistic) paraphasias during both connected speech and naming loaded onto the left hemisphere ventral and dorsal streams of language, respectively. Furthermore, for the first time using both connected speech and naming data, we localized semantically related paraphasias to more anterior left hemisphere temporal cortex and unrelated paraphasias to more posterior left temporal and temporoparietal cortex. The connected speech results, in particular, highlight a gradient of specificity as one translates visual recognition from left temporo-occipital cortex to posterior and subsequently anterior temporal cortex. The robustness of VLSM results for sound paraphasias derived during connected speech was notable, in that analyses performed on sound paraphasias from the connected speech task, and not the naming task, demonstrated significant results following removal of lesion volume variance and related apraxia of speech variance. Therefore, connected speech may be a particularly sensitive task on which to evaluate further lexical-phonological processing in the brain. The results presented here demonstrate the related, though different, distribution of paraphasias during connected speech, confirm that paraphasias arising in connected speech and single-word naming likely share neural origins, and endorse the need for continued evaluation of the neural substrates of connected speech processes.
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Project description:As the practice of conducting longitudinal fMRI studies to assess mechanisms of pain-reducing interventions becomes more common, there is a great need to assess the test-retest reliability of the pain-related BOLD fMRI signal across repeated sessions. This study quantitatively evaluated the reliability of heat pain-related BOLD fMRI brain responses in healthy volunteers across 3 sessions conducted on separate days using two measures: (1) intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC) calculated based on signal amplitude and (2) spatial overlap. The ICC analysis of pain-related BOLD fMRI responses showed fair-to-moderate intersession reliability in brain areas regarded as part of the cortical pain network. Areas with the highest intersession reliability based on the ICC analysis included the anterior midcingulate cortex, anterior insula, and second somatosensory cortex. Areas with the lowest intersession reliability based on the ICC analysis also showed low spatial reliability; these regions included pregenual anterior cingulate cortex, primary somatosensory cortex, and posterior insula. Thus, this study found regional differences in pain-related BOLD fMRI response reliability, which may provide useful information to guide longitudinal pain studies. A simple motor task (finger-thumb opposition) was performed by the same subjects in the same sessions as the painful heat stimuli were delivered. Intersession reliability of fMRI activation in cortical motor areas was comparable to previously published findings for both spatial overlap and ICC measures, providing support for the validity of the analytical approach used to assess intersession reliability of pain-related fMRI activation. A secondary finding of this study is that the use of standard ICC alone as a measure of reliability may not be sufficient, as the underlying variance structure of an fMRI dataset can result in inappropriately high ICC values; a method to eliminate these false positive results was used in this study and is recommended for future studies of test-retest reliability.
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Project description:Movements of the head and speech articulators have been observed in tandem during an alternating word pair production task driven by an accelerating rate metronome. Word pairs contrasted either onset or coda dissimilarity with same word controls. Results show that as production effort increased, so did speaker head nodding, and that nodding increased abruptly following errors. More errors occurred under faster production rates, and in coda rather than onset alternations. The greatest entrainment between head and articulators was observed at the fastest rate under coda alternation. Neither jaw coupling nor imposed prosodic stress was observed to be a primary driver of head movement. In alternating pairs, nodding frequency tracked the slower alternation rate rather than the syllable rate, interpreted as recruitment of additional degrees of freedom to stabilize the alternation pattern under increasing production rate pressure.
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Project description:This study examined the relative difficulty of oral speech act production tasks involving eight different types of speech acts for Chinese English as a foreign language (EFL) learners and the effects of three contextual variables, namely, power, social distance, and imposition, on such difficulty. Eight Oral Discourse Completion Task items, each representing a unique combination of the three contextual variables, were designed for each speech act. Eighty Chinese EFL learners responded to these items and their responses were rated for appropriateness by two native-speaking college English instructors. A Many-facet Rasch Measurement analysis suggested that the eight speech acts can be ordered by ascending difficulty as follows: Thank, Request, Suggestion, Disagreement, Invitation, Refusal, Offer, and Apology. Significant effects on performance scores were found for the interaction between each of the three contextual variables and speech act, and the specific effects observed varied by speech act. The implications of our findings for L2 pragmatics testing are discussed.
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Project description:IntroductionStructural MRI has long been used to characterize local morphological features of the human brain. Coordination patterns of the local morphological features among regions, however, are not well understood. Here, we constructed individual-level morphological brain networks and systematically examined their topological organization and long-term test-retest reliability under different analytical schemes of spatial smoothing, brain parcellation, and network type.MethodsThis study included 57 healthy participants and all participants completed two MRI scan sessions. Individual morphological brain networks were constructed by estimating interregional similarity in the distribution of regional gray matter volume in terms of the Kullback-Leibler divergence measure. Graph-based global and nodal network measures were then calculated, followed by the statistical comparison and intra-class correlation analysis.ResultsThe morphological brain networks were highly reproducible between sessions with significantly larger similarities for interhemispheric connections linking bilaterally homotopic regions. Further graph-based analyses revealed that the morphological brain networks exhibited nonrandom topological organization of small-worldness, high parallel efficiency and modular architecture regardless of the analytical choices of spatial smoothing, brain parcellation and network type. Moreover, several paralimbic and association regions were consistently revealed to be potential hubs. Nonetheless, the three studied factors particularly spatial smoothing significantly affected quantitative characterization of morphological brain networks. Further examination of long-term reliability revealed that all the examined network topological properties showed fair to excellent reliability irrespective of the analytical strategies, but performing spatial smoothing significantly improved reliability. Interestingly, nodal centralities were positively correlated with their reliabilities, and nodal degree and efficiency outperformed nodal betweenness with respect to reliability.ConclusionsOur findings support single-subject morphological network analysis as a meaningful and reliable method to characterize structural organization of the human brain; this method thus opens a new avenue toward understanding the substrate of intersubject variability in behavior and function and establishing morphological network biomarkers in brain disorders.
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Project description:Humans are capable of generating extraordinarily diverse articulatory movement combinations to produce meaningful speech. This ability to orchestrate specific phonetic sequences, and their syllabification and inflection over subsecond timescales allows us to produce thousands of word sounds and is a core component of language1,2. The fundamental cellular units and constructs by which we plan and produce words during speech, however, remain largely unknown. Here, using acute ultrahigh-density Neuropixels recordings capable of sampling across the cortical column in humans, we discover neurons in the language-dominant prefrontal cortex that encoded detailed information about the phonetic arrangement and composition of planned words during the production of natural speech. These neurons represented the specific order and structure of articulatory events before utterance and reflected the segmentation of phonetic sequences into distinct syllables. They also accurately predicted the phonetic, syllabic and morphological components of upcoming words and showed a temporally ordered dynamic. Collectively, we show how these mixtures of cells are broadly organized along the cortical column and how their activity patterns transition from articulation planning to production. We also demonstrate how these cells reliably track the detailed composition of consonant and vowel sounds during perception and how they distinguish processes specifically related to speaking from those related to listening. Together, these findings reveal a remarkably structured organization and encoding cascade of phonetic representations by prefrontal neurons in humans and demonstrate a cellular process that can support the production of speech.
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Project description:We consider whether a deep neural network trained with raw MEG data can be used to predict the age of children performing a verb-generation task, a monosyllable speech-elicitation task, and a multi-syllabic speech-elicitation task. Furthermore, we argue that the network makes predictions on the grounds of differences in speech development. Previous work has explored taking 'deep' neural networks (DNNs) designed for, or trained with, images to classify encephalographic recordings with some success, but this does little to acknowledge the structure of these data. Simple neural networks have been used extensively to classify data expressed as features, but require extensive feature engineering and pre-processing. We present novel DNNs trained using raw magnetoencephalography (MEG) and electroencephalography (EEG) recordings that mimic the feature-engineering pipeline. We highlight criteria the networks use, including relative weighting of channels and preferred spectro-temporal characteristics of re-weighted channels. Our data feature 92 subjects aged 4-18, recorded using a 151-channel MEG system. Our proposed model scores over 95% mean cross-validation accuracy distinguishing above and below 10 years of age in single trials of un-seen subjects, and can classify publicly available EEG with state-of-the-art accuracy.
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Project description:Deficits in fluent speech production following left hemisphere stroke are a central concern because of their impact on patients' lives and the insight they provide about the neural organization of language processing. Fluent speech production requires the rapid coordination of phonological, semantic, and syntactic processing, so this study examined how deficits in connected speech relate to these language sub-systems. Behavioural data (N = 69 participants with aphasia following left hemisphere stroke) consisted of a diverse and comprehensive set of narrative speech production measures and measures of overall severity, semantic deficits, and phonological deficits. These measures were entered into a principal component analysis with bifactor rotation-a latent structure model where each item loads on a general factor that reflects what is common among the items, and orthogonal factors that explain variance not accounted for by the general factor. Lesion data were available for 58 of the participants, and each factor score was analysed with multivariate lesion-symptom mapping. Effects of connectivity disruption were evaluated using robust regression with tract disconnection or graph theoretic measures of connectivity as predictors. The principal component analysis produced a four-factor solution that accounted for 70.6% of the variance in the data, with a general factor corresponding to the overall severity and length and complexity of speech output (complexity factor), a lexical syntax factor, and independent factors for Semantics and Phonology. Deficits in the complexity of speech output were associated with a large temporo-parietal region, similar to overall aphasia severity. The lexical syntax factor was associated with damage in a relatively small set of fronto-parietal regions which may reflect the recruitment of control systems to support retrieval and correct usage of lexical items that primarily serve a syntactic rather than semantic function. Tract-based measures of connectivity disruption were not statistically associated with the deficit scores after controlling for overall lesion volume. Language network efficiency and average clustering coefficient within the language network were significantly associated with deficit scores after controlling for overall lesion volume. These results highlight overall severity as the critical contributor to fluent speech in post-stroke aphasia, with a dissociable factor corresponding to lexical syntax.
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Project description:Two primary areas of damage have been implicated in apraxia of speech (AOS) based on the time post-stroke: (1) the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) in acute patients, and (2) the left anterior insula (aIns) in chronic patients. While AOS is widely characterized as a disorder in motor speech planning, little is known about the specific contributions of each of these regions in speech. The purpose of this study was to investigate cortical activation during speech production with a specific focus on the aIns and the IFG in normal adults. While undergoing sparse fMRI, 30 normal adults completed a 30-minute speech-repetition task consisting of three-syllable nonwords that contained either (a) English (native) syllables or (b) non-English (novel) syllables. When the novel syllable productions were compared to the native syllable productions, greater neural activation was observed in the aIns and IFG, particularly during the first 10 min of the task when novelty was the greatest. Although activation in the aIns remained high throughout the task for novel productions, greater activation was clearly demonstrated when the initial 10 min was compared to the final 10 min of the task. These results suggest increased activity within an extensive neural network, including the aIns and IFG, when the motor speech system is taxed, such as during the production of novel speech. We speculate that the amount of left aIns recruitment during speech production may be related to the internal construction of the motor speech unit such that the degree of novelty/automaticity would result in more or less demands respectively. The role of the IFG as a storehouse and integrative processor for previously acquired routines is also discussed.
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Project description:Cochlear implants are a standard therapy for deafness, yet the ability of implanted patients to understand speech varies widely. To better understand this variability in outcomes, the authors used functional near-infrared spectroscopy to image activity within regions of the auditory cortex and compare the results to behavioral measures of speech perception.The authors studied 32 deaf adults hearing through cochlear implants and 35 normal-hearing controls. The authors used functional near-infrared spectroscopy to measure responses within the lateral temporal lobe and the superior temporal gyrus to speech stimuli of varying intelligibility. The speech stimuli included normal speech, channelized speech (vocoded into 20 frequency bands), and scrambled speech (the 20 frequency bands were shuffled in random order). The authors also used environmental sounds as a control stimulus. Behavioral measures consisted of the speech reception threshold, consonant-nucleus-consonant words, and AzBio sentence tests measured in quiet.Both control and implanted participants with good speech perception exhibited greater cortical activations to natural speech than to unintelligible speech. In contrast, implanted participants with poor speech perception had large, indistinguishable cortical activations to all stimuli. The ratio of cortical activation to normal speech to that of scrambled speech directly correlated with the consonant-nucleus-consonant words and AzBio sentences scores. This pattern of cortical activation was not correlated with auditory threshold, age, side of implantation, or time after implantation. Turning off the implant reduced the cortical activations in all implanted participants.Together, these data indicate that the responses the authors measured within the lateral temporal lobe and the superior temporal gyrus correlate with behavioral measures of speech perception, demonstrating a neural basis for the variability in speech understanding outcomes after cochlear implantation.
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