Lesion correlates of auditory sentence comprehension deficits in post-stroke aphasia

Erica Adezati; Melissa Thye; Amelia J Edmondson-Stait; Jerzy P Szaflarski; Daniel Mirman

doi:10.1016/j.ynirp.2021.100076

Lesion correlates of auditory sentence comprehension deficits in post-stroke aphasia

Neuroimage Rep. 2022 Mar;2(1):None. doi: 10.1016/j.ynirp.2021.100076.

Authors

Erica Adezati¹, Melissa Thye¹, Amelia J Edmondson-Stait², Jerzy P Szaflarski³, Daniel Mirman¹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Psychology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK.
² Centre for Clinical Brain Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK.
³ Department of Neurology and the University of Alabama at Birmingham Epilepsy Center, University of Alabama at Birmingham Heersink School of Medicine, Birmingham, AL, USA.

Abstract

Auditory sentence comprehension requires coordination of multiple levels of processing: auditory-phonological perception, lexical-semantic comprehension, syntactic parsing and discourse construction, as well as executive functions such as verbal working memory (WM) and cognitive control. This study examined the lesion correlates of sentence comprehension deficits in post-stroke aphasia, building on prior work on this topic by using a different and clinically-relevant measure of sentence comprehension (the Token Test) and multivariate (SCCAN) and connectome-based lesion-symptom mapping methods. The key findings were that lesions in the posterior superior temporal lobe and inferior frontal gyrus (pars triangularis) were associated with sentence comprehension deficits, which was observed in both mass univariate and multivariate lesion-symptom mapping. Graph theoretic measures of connectome disruption were not statistically significantly associated with sentence comprehension deficits after accounting for overall lesion size.

Keywords: Aphasia; Language comprehension; Lesion-symptom mapping.

Grants and funding

R01 DC017137/DC/NIDCD NIH HHS/United States