Double dissociation between syntactic gender and picture naming processing: A brain stimulation mapping study.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/hbm.21026
- What double dissociation was documented?
They found a double dissociation between syntactic gender and picture naming processing. This supports independent network model theory.
- Would you predict a similar dissociation in English, why or why not?
No, English does not have syntactic gender. The authors ran their experiment with French subjects, who had syntactic gender in their language (un coq instead of une). Testing for syntactic gender is not possible for English (only the coq).
- What is meant by the term eloquent area as used in this paper?
The paper uses eloquent area to describe a part of the brain that if removed results in damage to linguistic ability.
The article reports several types of language disruption:
i. Speech arrest
ii. Naming errors: Anomia, phonemic paraphasia or semantic paraphasia
iii. Syntactic error
4) How did the neurosurgeon determine when there was an arrest of speech? Looking at the Figure 1 shown in the reading and the description in the text, what part of the brain gives rise to “speech arrest”. Would you consider speech arrest to be a linguistic or motoric error?
Speech Arrest - Inability to produce speech. Reliably elicited by stimulating ventral premotor cortex.
Paraphasia: production of unintended syllables, words, or phrases during the effort to speak
Naming Errors: Anomia (difficulty finding words), phonemic paraphasia (producing the wrong sound/phoneme), semantic paraphasia (producing the wrong semantically similar word).
Syntactic Error: In the paper, they only discuss syntactic gender errors, where a French article is used incorrectly with respect to the word.
The neurosurgeon determined whether there was an arrest of speech by asking the patient to regularly count from 1 to 10. Inability to do this was labeled as speech arrest. Looking at Figure 1, we see that the sites corresponding to speech arrest are all located on the ventral premotor cortex. The localization of areas associated with speech arrest suggests that the impairment was a motor error due to the subjects inability to perform the motor function of speech.
Speech Arrest: “Both, but for the part where taking about rn with speech arrest, its a motor impairment. To back the claim, the simulation that results in speech arrest was the vPM cortex. Not quite meat portion of premotor. Look how all of the triangles are right by the motor cortex.
Anomia and other errors are more dispersed. A lot on wernickes area.
Paraphasias: Not based on premotor cortex, suggest they are at least partially not motoric. So the answer is both.”
- Suppose a different patient was speaker of English, and stimulation of a brain region caused a “naming error” when shown the following picture: Provide an English example of a possible: (4pts)
a correct naming response
an anomic error
a phonological paraphasia
a semantic paraphasia
a correct naming response: the chicken
an anomic error: the… uhhh… bird
a phonological paraphasia: the /kɪ́ʧən/
a semantic paraphasia: the goose
- Suppose a French speaking patient saw the following pictures.
a. un coq b. une poule
When asked name these two pictures, what responses would constitute a syntactic error for each
of these images? (2 pts).
a. une coq
b. un poule
- Here are two different theoretical models that diagram how a speaker of French goes from a conceptual representation activated by pictures to speech articulation of a desired word. Note Model 1 and Model 2 differ in their respective intervening steps. Based on your reading, which of these two models provides a better explanation for the double dissociation described in the paper? Explain your reasoning. (4 pts).
The results of the paper would suggest Model 1 to be incorrect, and would lend evidence towards Model 2. The paper found a dissociation between syntactic gender and picture naming processing, suggesting that the networks responsible for producing them are independent. The ability for a subject to produce the correct article but not name the picture and vice versa discount the single pathway for lexical access that Model 1 proposes, where word and article are produced together. Instead, the paper finds evidence for the pathways being independent and an error in grammar or picture naming being separable.