Elsevier

NeuroImage

Volume 30, Issue 4, 1 May 2006, Pages 1414-1432
NeuroImage

Review
Meta-analyzing left hemisphere language areas: Phonology, semantics, and sentence processing

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2005.11.002Get rights and content

Abstract

The advent of functional neuroimaging has allowed tremendous advances in our understanding of brain–language relationships, in addition to generating substantial empirical data on this subject in the form of thousands of activation peak coordinates reported in a decade of language studies. We performed a large-scale meta-analysis of this literature, aimed at defining the composition of the phonological, semantic, and sentence processing networks in the frontal, temporal, and inferior parietal regions of the left cerebral hemisphere. For each of these language components, activation peaks issued from relevant component-specific contrasts were submitted to a spatial clustering algorithm, which gathered activation peaks on the basis of their relative distance in the MNI space. From a sample of 730 activation peaks extracted from 129 scientific reports selected among 260, we isolated 30 activation clusters, defining the functional fields constituting three distributed networks of frontal and temporal areas and revealing the functional organization of the left hemisphere for language. The functional role of each activation cluster is discussed based on the nature of the tasks in which it was involved. This meta-analysis sheds light on several contemporary issues, notably on the fine-scale functional architecture of the inferior frontal gyrus for phonological and semantic processing, the evidence for an elementary audio–motor loop involved in both comprehension and production of syllables including the primary auditory areas and the motor mouth area, evidence of areas of overlap between phonological and semantic processing, in particular at the location of the selective human voice area that was the seat of partial overlap of the three language components, the evidence of a cortical area in the pars opercularis of the inferior frontal gyrus dedicated to syntactic processing and in the posterior part of the superior temporal gyrus a region selectively activated by sentence and text processing, and the hypothesis that different working memory perception–actions loops are identifiable for the different language components. These results argue for large-scale architecture networks rather than modular organization of language in the left hemisphere.

Introduction

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, our understanding of how the human brain analyzes and produces language was shaped by aphasiology. This approach helped to define a model of language architecture, in which Broca's and Wernicke's areas—two fairly large and loosely defined cortical areas located in the left frontal and temporal lobes—were assigned the leading roles in language production and comprehension, respectively (Geschwind, 1970).

In the 1980s, the advent of non-invasive functional brain imaging techniques, such as positron emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), shifted the emphasis towards investigating the neural bases of language in the normal human brain. These techniques have enabled the investigation of specific components of brain language implementation through the tailoring of experimental neuro-linguistic paradigms. Fifteen years have passed since the initial pioneering studies (Petersen et al., 1988, Zatorre et al., 1992), and the amount of information coming from functional imaging studies offers the opportunity to propose an updated view on brain–language relationships.

Starting from 260 articles published between 1992 and 2004, the present meta-analysis is constituted with 129 scientific reports, including 262 component-specific cognitive contrasts reporting 730 activation peaks in the left hemisphere cortex. These contrasts were selected from studies investigating three language-processing component classes, namely, “phonological,” “semantic,” and “sentence processing” components. This classification emerges not from language models per se but more pragmatically from the design of the selected functional imaging protocols, which compared cognitive conditions with increasingly complex verbal material.

Selection of articles and contrasts to be included in the present meta-analysis was based upon five major criteria: 1—we limited the investigation to studies on normal volunteers; 2—we retained those that reported their results in stereotactic coordinates, thereby excluding articles using a region-of-interest (ROI) approach; 3—we selected component-specific contrasts, thereby excluding studies that used low-level reference tasks, such as cross-fixation or rest, for semantic and sentence processing investigations; 4—we selected activation peaks located in the left–middle and inferior frontal gyrus, including the insula, the superior, middle, and inferior temporal gyri and inferior parietal gyrus; 5—peaks that felt outside the brain or in the white matter were thus excluded. The selected peaks for each class were then submitted to a spatial clustering algorithm in the standard neuroanatomical reference space shared by the brain mapping community (i.e., Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) space), after appropriate conversion when necessary.

The present approach is in line with Poldrack's meta-analysis of the inferior frontal gyrus that allowed an anatomo-functional segregation for phonological and semantic processing (Poldrack et al., 1999). It is based on the whole brain three-dimensional and quantitative methodology that our laboratory has developed for the identification of the different pathways for word reading (Jobard et al., 2003). This approach appears complementary to recent reviews on language that investigated one language component (word processing (Indefrey and Levelt, 2004, Price, 2000), semantic processing (Bookheimer, 2002), sentence processing (Friederici, 2002)) and confronted a reduced number of investigations to propose a synthesis of functional imaging results within a given theoretical frame. These latter reviews are based on a fine-grained analysis of the paradigms and provide important insights on the neural representation of language. However, they describe functional anatomy of language at the gyral level only, leaving open the question of a more accurate cortical localization of a given process and thus that of specificity and interactions of different processes at regional level. Complementary to these works, the present methodology provides a fine-grained analysis of the brain functional activations, searching for the existence of areas dedicated to each of the language components–for instance, the segregation of semantic and phonological areas within the inferior frontal gyrus–and/or the opportunity to question the role of nearby or overlapping cortical areas. Given its power in terms of number of subjects and range of language paradigms, our meta-analysis approach offers the possibility of identifying regions that could have been overlooked by single protocols and that would correspond to invariants of a given language component. We think that such an approach is the only way to provide empirical arguments to support the theoretical shift proposed by M. Mesulam and J. Fuster that cognition in the brain is supported by overlapping and interactive large-scale cognitive networks rather than modules (Fuster, 2003, Mesulam, 1990).

Section snippets

Contrast selection

To meta-analyze the language neuroimaging literature, a classification of language-processing components had to be adopted in order to sort the various cognitive states that were reported. We retained mainly component-specific contrasts, i.e., contrasts designed to target a precise component; low-level contrasts, such as comparisons between a language task with a resting state or a low level baseline, were discarded because such contrasts result in the activation of multiple peaks corresponding

Results

The clustering process for each language component led to the segregation of three to five clusters in the left frontal lobe and five to seven in the left temporal and parietal areas (Fig. 1, bottom). Cluster standard deviations ranged from 8 to 19.5 mm (Table 4). While similar numbers of frontal and temporal peaks were found for phonological contrasts (frontal: 125, temporal: 122, see Table 4), a larger number of temporal peaks were noted for semantic (frontal: 145, temporal: 177) and sentence

Methodological issues

The first point that has to be discussed concerns the consequences of the methodological constraints applied on the studies selection. It must be underlined that the restriction we applied prevented us to include some studies that provide key elements in the comprehension of language networks. This pitfall is inherent to any meta-analysis, and we tried to overcome this limitation by integrating such articles within the discussion.

The second point is related to the large-grained resolution in

Summary and conclusions

This exploratory approach of left hemisphere language areas provided a set of results that reinforces and refines hypotheses emerging from isolated functional imaging studies.

Above all is the involvement of an elementary audio–motor loop for phonological processing, allowing a motor-sound-based representation for language sounds and involved in whether language is heard or enunciated, as had been proposed by Buchsbaum for auditory areas (Buchsbaum et al., 2001) and by Wilson for motor areas (

Acknowledgments

The authors are deeply indebted to Franck Lamberton and Nicolas Delcroix for their help in data analysis and to an anonymous reviewer for the clarity and relevance of her (his) comments that led the authors to revise their interpretation of some results.

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    These authors contributed equally to this work.

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