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Role of frontal versus temporal cortex in verbal fluency as revealed by voxel-based lesion symptom mapping

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 October 2006

JULIANA V. BALDO ,
SOPHIE SCHWARTZ ,
DAVID WILKINS  and
NINA F. DRONKERS
JULIANA V. BALDO
Affiliation:
Center for Aphasia and Related Disorders, VA Northern California Health Care System, Martinez, California
SOPHIE SCHWARTZ
Affiliation:
Departments of Neuroscience and Clinical Neurology, University of Geneva, Switzerland, Geneva, Switzerland
DAVID WILKINS
Affiliation:
Center for Aphasia and Related Disorders, VA Northern California Health Care System, Martinez, California
NINA F. DRONKERS
Affiliation:
Center for Aphasia and Related Disorders, VA Northern California Health Care System, Martinez, California Department of Neurology, University of California, Davis, Davis, California Center for Research in Language, University of California, San Diego, San Diego, California
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Abstract

Category and letter fluency tasks have been used to demonstrate psychological and neurological dissociations between semantic and phonological aspects of word retrieval. Some previous neuroimaging and lesion studies have suggested that category fluency (semantic-based word retrieval) is mediated primarily by temporal cortex, while letter fluency (letter-based word retrieval) is mediated primarily by frontal cortex. Other studies have suggested that both letter and category fluency are mediated by frontal cortex. We tested these hypotheses using voxel-based lesion symptom mapping (VLSM) in a group of 48 left-hemisphere stroke patients. VLSM maps revealed that category and letter fluency deficits correlate with lesions in temporal and frontal cortices, respectively. Other regions, including parietal cortex, were significantly implicated in both tasks. Our findings are therefore consistent with the hypothesis that temporal cortex subserves word retrieval constrained by semantics, whereas frontal regions are more critical for strategic word retrieval constrained by phonology. (JINS, 2006, 12, 896–900.)

Keywords

FluencyLexical retrievalLetter fluencyCategory fluencyTemporal cortexFrontal cortexSemantic retrieval
Type
BRIEF COMMUNICATIONS
Information
Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society , Volume 12 , Issue 6 , November 2006 , pp. 896 - 900
Copyright
© 2006 The International Neuropsychological Society

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