Differential activation of frontal lobe areas by lexical and semantic language tasks: a functional magnetic resonance imaging study. Academic Article uri icon

Overview

abstract

  • To determine whether frontal lobe regions, including Broca's area, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and supplementary motor area (SMA), are differentially activated during lexical and semantic language tasks, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging in eight healthy right-handed subjects silently performing two semantic tasks (adjective and verb generation) and a lexical retrieval task (noun recall). Activation was observed in Broca's area, DLPFC and SMA for all tasks. Broca's area activation was approximately doubled during the semantic tasks compared with the lexical task (verbs vs nouns: 19.1+/-4.5 vs 8.9+/-1.6 voxels, p=0.02; adjectives vs nouns 24.4+/-7.5 vs 10.1+/-2.8 voxels, p=0.04); however, there were no significant differences in the DLFPC or SMA across tasks. We conclude that Broca's area is more active during tasks that have a semantic content, whereas areas involved in preparatory processing (SMA) and memory retrieval (DLPFC) are engaged equally during both types of task.

publication date

  • January 1, 2006

Research

keywords

  • Frontal Lobe
  • Magnetic Resonance Imaging
  • Semantics
  • Vocabulary

Identity

Scopus Document Identifier

  • 30344455935

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

  • 10.1016/j.jocn.2005.02.009

PubMed ID

  • 16410203

Additional Document Info

volume

  • 13

issue

  • 1