Anterior temporal lobe is necessary for efficient lateralised processing of spoken word identity
Publication: Cortex
Thomas E. Cope, Yury Shtyrov, Lucy J. MacGregor, Rachel Holland, Friedemann Pulvermüller, James B. Rowe, Karalyn Patterson
1 May 2020
In the healthy human brain, the processing of language is strongly lateralised, usually to the left hemisphere, while the processing of complex non-linguistic sounds recruits brain regions bilaterally. Here the researchers asked whether the anterior temporal lobes, strongly implicated in semantic processing, are critical to this special treatment of spoken words. Nine patients with semantic dementia (SD) and fourteen age-matched controls underwent magnetoencephalography and structural MRI.
Source reconstructions confirmed recruitment of right-sided analogues of language regions in SD: atrophy of anterior temporal lobes was associated with increased activity in right temporal pole, middle temporal gyrus, inferior frontal gyrus and supramarginal gyrus.
Overall, the results indicate that anterior temporal lobes are necessary for normal and efficient lateralised processing of word identity by the language network.