White matter pathways for prosodic structure building: A case study.

The relevance of left dorsal and ventral fiber pathways for syntactic and semantic comprehension is well established, while pathways for prosody are little explored. The present study examined linguistic prosodic structure building in a patient whose right arcuate/superior longitudinal fascicles and posterior corpus callosum were transiently compromised by a vasogenic peritumoral edema. Compared to ten matched healthy controls, the patient's ability to detect irregular prosodic structure significantly improved between pre- and post-surgical assessment.

Connections for auditory language in the human brain.

The white matter bundles that underlie comprehension and production of language have been investigated for a number of years. Several studies have examined which fiber bundles (or tracts) are involved in auditory language processing, and which kind of language information is transmitted by which fiber tract. However, there is much debate about exactly which fiber tracts are involved, their precise course in the brain, how they should be named, and which functions they fulfill.

The language network.

Language processing is supported by different regions located in separate parts of the brain. A crucial condition for these regions to function as a network is the information transfer between them. This is guaranteed by dorsal and ventral pathways connecting prefrontal and temporal language-relevant regions.

Shared language: overlap and segregation of the neuronal infrastructure for speaking and listening revealed by functional MRI.

Whether the brain's speech-production system is also involved in speech comprehension is a topic of much debate. Research has focused on whether motor areas are involved in listening, but overlap between speaking and listening might occur not only at primary sensory and motor levels, but also at linguistic levels (where semantic, lexical, and syntactic processes occur). Using functional MRI adaptation during speech comprehension and production, we found that the brain areas involved in semantic, lexical, and syntactic processing are mostly the same for speaking and for listening.