Universität Stuttgart
Institut für maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung
Abstract
In this study we will give an overview of the experimental work on the
neuroanatomical correlates of language and speech production that we
have done in recent years. First we will introduce the methodology of
event-related functional magnetic neuro-imaging and the experimental
paradigm that we employed. Then we will present and discuss the results
of our experiments on (1) speech motor control, (2) articulatory
complexity, (3) the neuroanatomical correlates of prosody, and (4) the
neurocognitive substrates of syntactic processing. Experiments (1) and
(2) show that the expected large motor speech network consisting of SMA,
motor cortex and cerebellum is only active in planning and execution of
simple articulatory movements. Increased articulatory complexity leads
to more focused activation. Furthermore, we can show that only the
execution of speech movements recruits the left anterior insula, while
articulatory planning does not. The results of experiment (3) indicate
that it is not the function of prosody (linguistic vs. affective) that
controls lateralisation of prosodic processing, but that more general
characteristics of the processing units like the size of the prosodic
frame are responsible for the activation of different cortical regions.
Finally, in experiment (4) we present first results on syntactic
processing in speech production. Besides the expected activation of
Broca's area we found activations in Wernicke's area and in the
cerebellum. We have also found evidence for activations in other
cortical areas, which are less often implicated in clinical studies on
brain language correlations. The cognitive relevance of these areas and
networks is still to be elucidated.
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