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

We used picture description as a measure of connected speech because picture description provides clear conceptual targets which make identifying the type of paraphasia, and its intended target, more reliable. For instance, in describing a picture of a circus, we can make the reliable judgment that the word 'cat' is a semantically related paraphasia of 'lion.' Furthermore, utterance context in picture description provides a source of constraint that is not available in picture naming. Specifically, because . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license is made available under a The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the author/funder. It . https://doi.org/10.1101/544841 doi: bioRxiv preprint connected speech provides context (which naming does not), which may elicit the production of verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and other referential words and phrases, we are more often than not able to identify the targets of paraphasias. For example, while describing a circus scene, one participant said: "the clown is sitting on its back legs," erroneously saying 'clown' instead of 'lion.' Because we knew the context of the scene, 'clown' and 'lion' were easily classified as semantically related (more specifically, thematically semantically related).