Brain structure associations with phonemic and semantic fluency in typically-developing children.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Gonzalez MR
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8242963 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:Phonemic and semantic fluency are neuropsychological tests widely used to assess patients' language and executive abilities and are highly sensitive tests in detecting language deficits in glioma patients. However, the networks that are involved in these tasks could be distinct and suggesting either a frontal (phonemic) or temporal (semantic) involvement. 42 right-handed patients (26 male, mean age = 52.5 years, SD=±13.3) were included in this retrospective study. Patients underwent awake (54.8%) or asleep (45.2%) surgery for low-grade (16.7%) or high-grade-glioma (83.3%) in the frontal (64.3%) or temporal lobe (35.7%) of the left (50%) or right (50%) hemisphere. Pre-operative tractography was reconstructed for each patient, with segmentation of the inferior fronto-occipital fasciculus (IFOF), arcuate fasciculus (AF), uncinate fasciculus (UF), inferior longitudinal fasciculus (ILF), third branch of the superior longitudinal fasciculus (SLF-III), frontal aslant tract (FAT), and cortico-spinal tract (CST). Post-operative percentage of damage and disconnection of each tract, based on the patients' surgical cavities, were correlated with verbal fluencies scores at one week and one month after surgery. Analyses of differences between fluency scores at these timepoints (before surgery, one week and one month after surgery) were performed; lesion-symptom mapping was used to identify the correlation between cortical areas and post-operative scores. Immediately after surgery, a transient impairment of verbal fluency was observed, that improved within a month. Left hemisphere lesions were related to a worse verbal fluency performance, being a damage to the left superior frontal or temporal gyri associated with phonemic or semantic fluency deficit, respectively. At a subcortical level, disconnection analyses revealed that fluency scores were associated to the involvement of the left FAT and the left frontal part of the IFOF for phonemic fluency, and the association was still present one month after surgery. For semantic fluency, the correlation between post-surgery performance emerged for the left AF, UF, ILF and the temporal part of the IFOF, but disappeared at the follow-up. This approach based on the patients' pre-operative tractography, allowed to trace for the first time a dissociation between white matter pathways integrity and verbal fluency after surgery for glioma resection. Our results confirm the involvement of a frontal anterior pathway for phonemic fluency and a ventral temporal pathway for semantic fluency. Finally, our longitudinal results suggest that the frontal executive pathway requires a longer interval to recover compared to the semantic one.
| S-EPMC9400120 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundFor word production, we may consciously pursue semantic or phonological search strategies, but it is uncertain whether we can retrieve the different aspects of lexical information independently from each other. We therefore studied the spread of semantic information into words produced under exclusively phonemic task demands.Methods42 subjects participated in a letter verbal fluency task, demanding the production of as many s-words as possible in two minutes. Based on curve fittings for the time courses of word production, output spurts (temporal clusters) considered to reflect rapid lexical retrieval based on automatic activation spread, were identified. Semantic and phonemic word relatedness within versus between these clusters was assessed by respective scores (0 meaning no relation, 4 maximum relation).ResultsSubjects produced 27.5 (±9.4) words belonging to 6.7 (±2.4) clusters. Both phonemically and semantically words were more related within clusters than between clusters (phon: 0.33±0.22 vs. 0.19±0.17, p<.01; sem: 0.65±0.29 vs. 0.37±0.29, p<.01). Whereas the extent of phonemic relatedness correlated with high task performance, the contrary was the case for the extent of semantic relatedness.ConclusionThe results indicate that semantic information spread occurs, even if the consciously pursued word search strategy is purely phonological. This, together with the negative correlation between semantic relatedness and verbal output suits the idea of a semantic default mode of lexical search, acting against rapid task performance in the given scenario of phonemic verbal fluency. The simultaneity of enhanced semantic and phonemic word relatedness within the same temporal cluster boundaries suggests an interaction between content and sound-related information whenever a new semantic field has been opened.
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Project description:Developmental dyscalculia (DD) is a learning disability affecting the acquisition of numerical-arithmetical skills. Studies report persistent deficits in number processing and aberrant functional activation of the fronto-parietal numerical network in DD. However, the neural development of numerical abilities has been scarcely investigated. The present paper provides a first attempt to investigate behavioral and neural trajectories of numerical abilities longitudinally in typically developing (TD) and DD children. During a study period of 4 years, 28 children (8-11 years) were evaluated twice by means of neuropsychological tests and a numerical order fMRI paradigm. Over time, TD children improved in numerical abilities and showed a consistent and well-developed fronto-parietal network. In contrast, DD children revealed persistent deficits in number processing and arithmetic. Brain imaging results of the DD group showed an age-related activation increase in parietal regions (intraparietal sulcus), pointing to a delayed development of number processing areas. Besides, an activation increase in frontal areas was observed over time, indicating the use of compensatory mechanisms. In conclusion, results suggest a continuation in neural development of number representation in DD, whereas the neural network for simple ordinal number estimation seems to be stable or show only subtle changes in TD children over time.
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Project description:Semantic and phonemic fluency tasks are frequently used to test executive functioning, speed and attention, and access to the mental lexicon. In semantic fluency tasks, subjects are required to generate words belonging to a category (e.g., animals) within a limited time window, whereas in phonemic fluency tasks subjects have to generate words starting with a given letter. Anatomical correlates of semantic and phonemic fluency are currently assumed to overlap in left frontal structures, reflecting shared executive processes, and to be distinct in left temporal and right frontal structures, reflecting involvement of distinct memory processes and search strategies. Definite evidence for this assumption is lacking. To further establish the anatomical correlates of semantic and phonemic fluency, we applied assumption-free voxel-based and region-of-interest-based lesion-symptom mapping in 93 patients with ischemic stroke. Fluency was assessed by asking patients to name animals (semantic), and words starting with the letter N and A (phonemic). Our findings indicate that anatomical correlates of semantic and phonemic fluency overlap in the left inferior frontal gyrus and insula, reflecting shared underlying cognitive processes. Phonemic fluency additionally draws on the left rolandic operculum, which might reflect a search through phonological memory, and the middle frontal gyrus. Semantic fluency additionally draws on left medial temporal regions, probably reflecting a search through semantic memory, and the right inferior frontal gyrus, which might reflect the application of a visuospatial mental imagery strategy in semantic fluency. These findings establish shared and distinct anatomical correlates of semantic and phonemic fluency.
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Project description:Neural compensatory mechanisms associated with broad cognitive abilities have been studied. However, those associated with specific cognitive subdomains (e.g., verbal fluency) remain to be investigated in healthy aging. Here, we delineate: (a) neural substrates of verbal (phonemic) fluency, and (b) compensatory mechanisms mediating the association between these neural substrates and phonemic fluency. We analyzed resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging from 133 right-handed, cognitively normal individuals who underwent the Controlled Oral Word Association Test (COWAT) to record their phonemic fluency. We evaluated functional connectivity in an established and extended language network comprising Wernicke, Broca, thalamic and anti-correlated modules. (a) We conducted voxel-wise multiple linear regression to identify the brain areas associated with phonemic fluency. (b) We used mediation effects of cognitive reserve, measured by the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Information subtest, upon the association between functional connectivity and phonemic fluency tested to investigate compensation. We found that: (a) Greater functional connectivity between the Wernicke module and brain areas within the anti-correlated module was associated with better performance in phonemic fluency, (b) Cognitive reserve was an unlikely mediator in younger adults. In contrast, cognitive reserve was a partial mediator of the association between functional connectivity and phonemic fluency in older adults, likely representing compensation to counter the effect of aging. We conclude that in healthy aging, higher performance in phonemic fluency at older ages could be attributed to greater functional connectivity partially facilitated by higher cognitive reserve, presumably reflecting compensatory mechanisms to minimize the effect of aging.
| S-EPMC8287584 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The aim of the present study is to investigate the development of visuospatial attention in typically developing children and to propose reference values for children for the following six visuospatial attention tests: star cancellation, Ogden figure, reading test, line bisection, proprioceptive pointing and visuo-proprioceptive pointing. Data of 159 children attending primary or secondary school in the Fédération Wallonie Bruxelles (Belgium) were analyzed. Results showed that the children's performance on star cancellation, Ogden figure and reading test improved until the age of 13 years, whereas their performance on proprioceptive pointing, visuo-proprioceptive pointing and line bisection was stable with increasing age. These results suggest that the execution of different types of visuospatial attention tasks are not following the same developmental trajectories. This dissociation is strengthened by the lack of correlation observed between tests assessing egocentric and allocentric visuospatial attention, except for the star cancellation test (egocentric) and the Ogden figure copy (ego- and allocentric). Reference values are proposed that may be useful to examine children with clinical disorders of visuospatial attention.
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Project description:Children with language disorders have particular difficulty with verbs, but when this difficulty emerges is unknown. We examined syntactic (transitive, intransitive, ditransitive) and semantic (manner, result) features of two-year-olds' verb vocabularies, contrasting late talkers and typically developing children to look for early differences in verb vocabulary. We conducted a retrospective analysis of parent-reported expressive vocabulary from the Language Development Survey (N = 564, N(LT) = 62) (Rescorla, 1989). Verbs were coded for the presence or absence of each syntactic and semantic feature. Binomial mixed-effects regressions revealed the effect of feature on children's knowledge and whether feature interacted with group classification. Our results revealed mostly similarities between late talkers and typically developing children. All children's vocabularies showed a bias against verbs that occur in ditransitive frames. One feature showed a difference between groups: late talkers showed a bias against manner verbs that typically developing children did not.
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Project description:Recovering a system's underlying structure from its historical records (also called structure mining) is essential to making valid inferences about that system's behavior. For example, making reliable predictions about system failures based on maintenance work-order data requires determining how concepts described within the work order are related. Obtaining such structural information is challenging, requiring system understanding, synthesis, and representation design. This is often either too difficult or too time-consuming to produce. Consequently, a common approach to quickly eliciting tacit structural knowledge from experts is to gather uncontrolled keywords as record labels-i.e., "tags." One can then map those tags to concepts within the structure and quantitatively infer relationships between them. Existing models of tag similarity tend to either depend on correlation strength (e.g. overall co-occurrence frequencies), or on conditional strength (e.g. tag sequence probabilities). A key difficulty in applying either model is understanding under what conditions one is better than the other for overall structure recovery. In this paper, we investigate the core assumptions and implications of these two classes of similarity measures on structure recovery tasks. Then, using lessons from this characterization, we borrow from recent psychology literature on semantic fluency tasks to construct a tag similarity measure that emulates how humans recall tags from memory. We show through empirical testing that this method combines strengths of both common modeling paradigms. We also demonstrate its potential as a pre-processor for structure mining tasks via a case study in semi-supervised learning on real excavator maintenance work-orders.
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Project description:Epigenetic perturbations in the early embryo could have later effects during development. For a disease such as autism, where a diagnosis is hard before two years of age but earlier intervention is correlated with better outcomes, finding a molecular signature of the disease at birth could have a significant impact of the quality of life. Since placenta also derives from the early embryo, is a readily-available tissue at birth, and has a unique DNA methylation pattern, we tested whether disruptions in placental DNA methylation was predictive of autism. As part of the MARBLES study, parents that already had an autistic child and were therefore at much greater risk to have another autistic child were followed as they planned another pregnancy. Biological samples were collected at birth and the children followed for several years to determine the diagnosis. “Typical” children in this study were those that did not later develop autism.
2018-04-05 | GSE67615 | GEO
Project description:Callous-unemotional traits are characterized by a lack of empathy, a disregard for others' feelings and shallow or deficient affect, such as a lack of remorse or guilt. Neuroanatomical correlates of callous-unemotional traits have been demonstrated in clinical samples (i.e., adolescents with disruptive behavior disorders). However, it is unknown whether callous-unemotional traits are associated with neuroanatomical correlates within normative populations without clinical levels of aggression or antisocial behavior. Here we investigated the relationship between callous-unemotional traits and gray matter volume using voxel-based morphometry in a large sample of typically-developing boys and girls (N = 189). Whole-brain multiple regression analyses controlling for site, total intracranial volume, and age were conducted in the whole sample and in boys and girls individually. Results revealed that sex and callous-unemotional traits interacted to predict gray matter volume when considering the whole sample. This interaction was driven by a significant positive correlation between callous-unemotional traits and bilateral anterior insula volume in boys, but not girls. Insula gray matter volume explained 19% of the variance in callous-unemotional traits for boys. Our results demonstrate that callous-unemotional traits are related to variations in brain structure beyond psychiatric samples. This association was observed for boys only, underlining the importance of considering sex as a factor in future research designs. Future longitudinal studies should determine whether these findings hold over childhood and adolescence, and whether the neuroanatomical correlates of callous-unemotional traits are predictive of future psychiatric vulnerability.General scientific summaryThis study suggests that callous-unemotional traits have a neuroanatomical correlate within typically developing boys, but not girls. Bilateral anterior insula volume explains up to 19% of the variance in callous-unemotional traits in boys.
| S-EPMC5842751 | biostudies-literature