Publications by authors named "Kayoko Okada"

Speech production involves the careful orchestration of sophisticated systems, yet overt speech errors rarely occur under naturalistic conditions. The present functional magnetic resonance imaging study sought neural evidence for internal error detection and correction by leveraging a tongue twister paradigm that induces the for speech errors while excluding any overt errors from analysis. Previous work using the same paradigm in the context of silently articulated and imagined speech production tasks has demonstrated forward predictive signals in auditory cortex during speech and presented suggestive evidence of internal error correction in left posterior middle temporal gyrus (pMTG) on the basis that this area tended toward showing a stronger response when potential speech errors are biased toward nonwords compared to words (Okada et al.

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The transplantation of endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs) is used to promote wound angiogenesis. In patients with chronic wounds and accompanying morbidities, EPCs are often compromised in number and function. To overcome these limitations, we previously developed a quality and quantity controlled (QQ) culture system to enrich peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMNCs) in EPCs.

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Models of speech production posit a role for the motor system, predominantly the posterior inferior frontal gyrus, in encoding complex phonological representations for speech production, at the phonemic, syllable, and word levels [Roelofs, A. A dorsal-pathway account of aphasic language production: The WEAVER++/ARC model. Cortex, 59(Suppl.

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Acute kidney injury (AKI) is a major clinical problem that still has no established treatment. We investigated the efficacy of cultured human peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMNCs) for AKI. Ischemia/reperfusion injury (IRI) was used to induce AKI in male nonobese diabetic (NOD/severe combined immunodeficiency) mice aged 7 to 8 wk.

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Persistent inflammatory environment and abnormal macrophage activation are characteristics of chronic diabetic wounds. Here, we attempted to characterize the differences in macrophage activation and temporal variations in cytokine expression in diabetic and non-diabetic wounds, with a focus on interleukin (IL)-6 mRNA expression and the p38 MAPK and PI3K/Akt signaling pathways. Cutaneous wound closure, CD68- and arginase-1 (Arg-1)-expressing macrophages, and cytokine mRNA expression were examined in non-diabetic and streptozotocin-induced type 1 diabetic mice at different time points after injury.

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Recent models of speech production suggest that motor commands generate forward predictions of the auditory consequences of those commands, that these forward predications can be used to monitor and correct speech output, and that this system is hierarchically organized (Hickok, Houde, & Rong, Neuron, 69(3), 407--422, 2011; Pickering & Garrod, Behavior and Brain Sciences, 36(4), 329--347, 2013). Recent psycholinguistic research has shown that internally generated speech (i.e.

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Since the discovery of mirror neurons, there has been a great deal of interest in understanding the relationship between perception and action, and the role of the human mirror system in language comprehension and production. Two questions have dominated research. One concerns the role of Broca's area in speech perception.

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Background: Basic fibroblast growth factors (bFGFs) play a crucial role in wound healing by promoting fibroblast proliferation and neovascularization. However, drawback of bFGF is short half-life in free form. Gelatin has a capability of sustaining growth factors, which are gradually released while degradation.

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Research on the neural basis of speech-reading implicates a network of auditory language regions involving inferior frontal cortex, premotor cortex and sites along superior temporal cortex. In audiovisual speech studies, neural activity is consistently reported in posterior superior temporal Sulcus (pSTS) and this site has been implicated in multimodal integration. Traditionally, multisensory interactions are considered high-level processing that engages heteromodal association cortices (such as STS).

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The neural correlates of successful retrieval on tests of word stem recall and recognition memory were compared. In the recall test, subjects viewed word stems, half of which were associated with studied items and half with unstudied items, and for each stem attempted to recall a corresponding study word. In the recognition test, old/new judgments were made on old and new words.

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Conduction aphasia is a language disorder characterized by frequent speech errors, impaired verbatim repetition, a deficit in phonological short-term memory, and naming difficulties in the presence of otherwise fluent and grammatical speech output. While traditional models of conduction aphasia have typically implicated white matter pathways, recent advances in lesions reconstruction methodology applied to groups of patients have implicated left temporoparietal zones. Parallel work using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has pinpointed a region in the posterior most portion of the left planum temporale, area Spt, which is critical for phonological working memory.

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Prior lesion and functional imaging studies have highlighted the importance of the left ventral occipito-temporal (LvOT) cortex for visual word recognition. Within this area, there is a posterior-anterior hierarchy of subregions that are specialized for different stages of orthographic processing. The aim of the present fMRI study was to dissociate the effects of subword orthographic typicality (e.

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Hierarchical organization of human auditory cortex has been inferred from functional imaging observations that core regions respond to simple stimuli (tones) whereas downstream regions are selectively responsive to more complex stimuli (band-pass noise, speech). It is assumed that core regions code low-level features, which are combined at higher levels in the auditory system to yield more abstract neural codes. However, this hypothesis has not been critically evaluated in the auditory domain.

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Visual speech (lip-reading) influences the perception of heard speech. The literature suggests at least two possible mechanisms for this influence: "direct" sensory-sensory interaction, whereby sensory signals from auditory and visual modalities are integrated directly, likely in the superior temporal sulcus, and "indirect" sensory-motor interaction, whereby visual speech is first mapped onto motor-speech representations in the frontal lobe, which in turn influences sensory perception via sensory-motor integration networks. We hypothesize that both mechanisms exist, and further that previous demonstrations of lip-reading functional activations in Broca's region and the posterior planum temporale reflect the sensory-motor mechanism.

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Processing incoming sensory information and transforming this input into appropriate motor responses is a critical and ongoing aspect of our moment-to-moment interaction with the environment. While the neural mechanisms in the posterior parietal cortex (PPC) that support the transformation of sensory inputs into simple eye or limb movements has received a great deal of empirical attention-in part because these processes are easy to study in nonhuman primates-little work has been done on sensory-motor transformations in the domain of speech. Here we used functional magnetic resonance imaging and multivariate analysis techniques to demonstrate that a region of the planum temporale (Spt) shows distinct spatial activation patterns during sensory and motor aspects of a speech task.

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General agreement exists that dorsal aspects of the temporal lobe support the perception of speech but there is less agreement regarding the mapping between levels of speech processing and neural regions within the dorsal temporal lobe. The present experiment sought to identify temporal lobe regions that support one such level, namely, lexical-phonological representation/processing. To do this, we manipulated phonological neighborhood density, a variable that affects processing within lexical-phonological networks.

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Recent neuroimaging studies and neuropsychological data suggest that there are regions in posterior auditory cortex that participate both in speech perception and speech production. An outstanding question is whether the same neural regions support both perception and production or whether there exist discrete cortical fields subserving these functions. Previous neurophysiological studies suggest that there is indeed regional overlap between these systems, but those studies used a rehearsal task to assess production.

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The existence of a specialized mechanism supporting auditory motion processing in humans is a matter of debate in the psychophysical literature. Recent functional neuroimaging data appear to have resolved the debate in favor of a specialized motion system in that several studies have found cortical regions that seem to be motion selective. While all these studies contrast some form of moving auditory stimulation with a stationary stimulus, none have adequately controlled for the possibility that these areas are simply computing sound-source location and not motion per se: a moving stimulus varies in spatial location as well as motion, and so a system computing spatial location (and not motion) would be activated in response to both a moving and stationary sound source.

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Several lines of evidence show that posterior portions of left auditory cortex participate in aspects of speech production. A current hypothesis is that these regions play a specific role in processing phonological codes. We used event-related fMRI to test this hypothesis.

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