Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 112, Issue 6, Pages 1868-1873Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1418162112
Keywords
language; sound envelope; Broca's area; morphosyntax; temporal lobe
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Funding
- Neurocognition and Theoretical Syntax Research Center at Institute for Advanced Studies - Pavia
- Department of Electrical, Computer, and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Pavia
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How language is encoded by neural activity in the higher-level language areas of humans is still largely unknown. We investigated whether the electrophysiological activity of Broca's area correlates with the sound of the utterances produced. During speech perception, the electric cortical activity of the auditory areas correlates with the sound envelope of the utterances. In our experiment, we compared the electrocorticogram recorded during awake neurosurgical operations in Broca's area and in the dominant temporal lobe with the sound envelope of single words versus sentences read aloud or mentally by the patients. Our results indicate that the electrocorticogram correlates with the sound envelope of the utterances, starting before any sound is produced and even in the absence of speech, when the patient is reading mentally. No correlations were found when the electrocorticogram was recorded in the superior parietal gyrus, an area not directly involved in language generation, or in Broca's area when the participants were executing a repetitive motor task, which did not include any linguistic content, with their dominant hand. The distribution of suprathreshold correlations across frequencies of cortical activities varied whether the sound envelope derived from words or sentences. Our results suggest the activity of language areas is organized by sound when language is generated before any utterance is produced or heard.
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