Search results for " Brain function"
showing 10 items of 119 documents
Auditory event-related potentials measured in kindergarten predict later reading problems at school age.
2013
Identifying children at risk for reading problems or dyslexia at kindergarten age could improve support for beginning readers. Brain event-related potentials (ERPs) were measured for temporally complex pseudowords and corresponding non-speech stimuli from 6.5-year-old children who participated in behavioral literacy tests again at 9 years in the second grade. Children who had reading problems at school age had larger N250 responses to speech and non-speech stimuli particularly at the left hemisphere. The brain responses also correlated with reading skills. The results suggest that atypical auditory and speech processing are a neural-level risk factor for future reading problems. [Supplement…
Prismatic adaptation effects on spatial representation of time in neglect patients
2011
Abstract Processing of temporal information may require the use of spatial attention to represent time along a mental time line. We used prismatic adaptation (PA) to explore the contribution of spatial attention to the spatial representation of time in right brain damaged patients with and without neglect of left space and in age-matched healthy controls. Right brain damaged patients presented time underestimation deficits, that were significantly greater in patients with neglect than in patients without neglect. PA inducing leftward attentional deviation reduced time underestimation deficit in patients with neglect. The results support the hypothesis that a right hemispheric network has a …
Electrical brain activity and facial electromyography responses to irony in dysphoric and non-dysphoric participants
2020
We studied irony comprehension and emotional reactions to irony in dysphoric and control participants. Electroencephalography (EEG) and facial electromyography (EMG) were measured when spoken conversations were presented with pictures that provided either congruent (non-ironic) or incongruent (ironic) contexts. In a separate session, participants evaluated the congruency and valence of the stimuli. While both groups rated ironic stimuli funnier than non-ironic stimuli, the control group rated all the stimuli funnier than the dysphoric group. N400-like activity, P600, and EMG activity indicating smiling were larger after the ironic stimuli than the non-ironic stimuli for both groups. Further…
Early emergence of deviant frontal fMRI activity for phonological processes in poor beginning readers.
2010
Phonological awareness refers to the ability to perceive and manipulate the sound structure of language and is especially important when children learn to read. Poor phonological awareness is considered the major cause for the emergence of reading difficulties. In this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, we examined the brain correlates of phonological processing in young beginning readers (aged 8.3+/-0.4 y, 2nd grade) with poor (25th percentile) or normal, age-appropriate reading skills (40th percentile) using a covert reading and mental letter substitution task. Letter substitution in words and nonwords induced pronounced activity in a left frontal language network related…
Fluency and rule breaking behaviour in the frontal cortex
2020
Design (DF) and phonemic fluency tests (FAS; D-KEFS, 2001) are commonly used to investigate voluntary generation. Despite this, several important issues remain poorly investigated. In a sizeable sample of patients with focal left or right frontal lesion we established that voluntary generation performance cannot be accounted for by fluid intelligence. For DF we found patients performed significantly worse than healthy controls (HC) only on the switch condition. However, no significant difference between left and right frontal patients was found. In contrast, left frontal patients were significantly impaired when compared with HC and right frontal patients on FAS. These lateralization findin…
Embedded word priming elicits enhanced fMRI responses in the visual word form area.
2018
Lexical embedding is common in all languages and elicits mutual orthographic interference between an embedded word and its carrier. The neural basis of such interference remains unknown. We employed a novel fMRI prime-target embedded word paradigm to test for involvement of a visual word form area (VWFA) in left ventral occipitotemporal cortex in co-activation of embedded words and their carriers. Based on the results of related fMRI studies we predicted either enhancement or suppression of fMRI responses to embedded words initially viewed as primes, and repeated in the context of target carrier words. Our results clearly showed enhancement of fMRI responses in the VWFA to embedded-carrier …
Neurophysiology in preschool improves behavioral prediction of reading ability throughout primary school.
2009
BACKGROUND: More struggling readers could profit from additional help at the beginning of reading acquisition if dyslexia prediction were more successful. Currently, prediction is based only on behavioral assessment of early phonological processing deficits associated with dyslexia, but it might be improved by adding brain-based measures. METHODS: In a 5-year longitudinal study of children with (n = 21) and without (n = 23) familial risk for dyslexia, we tested whether neurophysiological measures of automatic phoneme and tone deviance processing obtained in kindergarten would improve prediction of reading over behavioral measures alone. RESULTS: Together, neurophysiological and behavioral m…
Functional reorganization of the attentional networks in low-grade glioma patients: a longitudinal study.
2015
International audience; Right brain damage often provokes deficits of visuospatial attention. Although the spatial attention networks have been widely investigated in stroke patients as well as in the healthy brain, little is known about the impact of slow growing lesions in the right hemisphere. We here present a longitudinal study of 20 patients who have been undergoing awake brain surgery with per-operative line bisection testing. Our aim was to investigate the impact of tumour presence and of tumour resection on the functional (re)organization of the attention networks. We assessed patients' performance on lateralized target detection, visual exploration and line bisection before surger…
Abnormal functioning of the left temporal lobe in language-impaired children
2014
Specific language impairment is associated with enduring problems in language-related functions. We followed the spatiotemporal course of cortical activation in SLI using magnetoencephalography. In the experiment, children with normal and impaired language development heard spoken real words and pseudowords presented only once or two times in a row. In typically developing children, the activation in the bilateral superior temporal cortices was attenuated to the second presentation of the same word. In SLI children, this repetition effect was nearly nonexistent in the left hemisphere. Furthermore, the activation was equally strong to words and pseudowords in SLI children whereas in the typi…
The reliability of continuous brain responses during naturalistic listening to music
2015
Low-level (timbral) and high-level (tonal and rhythmical) musical features during continuous listening to music, studied by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), have been shown to elicit large-scale responses in cognitive, motor, and limbic brain networks. Using a similar methodological approach and a similar group of participants, we aimed to study the replicability of previous findings. Participants' fMRI responses during continuous listening of a tango Nuevo piece were correlated voxelwise against the time series of a set of perceptually validated musical features computationally extracted from the music. The replicability of previous results and the present study was assessed b…