Neural organization of speech production: A lesion-based study of error patterns in connected speech

Brielle C Stark; Alexandra Basilakos; Gregory Hickok; Chris Rorden; Leonardo Bonilha; Julius Fridriksson

Further, comparing lesion damage associated with verbal paraphasias made during connected speech allows us to make a finer distinction between semantic and unrelated errors in the anterior and posterior temporal lobe. Others have argued that semantic specificity increases on a gradient from posterior to anterior areas of the lateral temporal cortex, where the function of the anterior temporal lobe is most specific, especially specific for taxonomic and entity knowledge (for a review, see: Binder et al., 2009) . In people with poststroke aphasia, semantic naming errors are most commonly taxonomic-or entity-specific (Jefferies and Lambon Ralph, 2006; Binder et al., 2009; Walker et al., 2011) , where the resultant error is related by category, such as "apple" named as "pear". Semantically related paraphasias in our connected speech samples, which were likewise overwhelmingly taxonomic in nature, associated with more left anterior temporal lobe damage, suggesting subtle disruption of a more specific taxonomic-or entity-specific system.