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15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15)Barcelona, Spain |
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15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15)Barcelona, Spain |
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In the present study, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging
(fMRI) to localise the brain areas involved in a specific auditory-verbal
imagery task, the Verbal Transformation Effect (VTE).
Two conditions
were contrasted: a baseline condition involving simple mental repetition
of monosyllables and a first name vs. a VTE condition involving mental
repetition of the same items with active search for verbal transformation.
Significant activations, predominantly within the left hemisphere,
were obtained by contrasting VTE vs. baseline, within the inferior
frontal gyrus and the insular region, the supramarginal gyrus, the
premotor cortex and supplementary motor area, the caudate nucleus and
the cerebellar cortex.
In line with previous behavioural studies,
this study indicates that during a VTE task the same regions are involved
as those relative to the Phonological Loop, the verbal component of
Baddeley's working memory model. Given that VTE and baseline conditions
only differ in the presence or absence of a search for syllable change,
we hypothesize that the left inferior frontal and supramarginal gyri
activation indicate a frontal/parietal coupling for on-line linguistic
information processing and decision-making.
Bibliographic reference. Sato, Marc / Baciu, Monica / Loevenbruck, Hélène / Abry, Christian / Segebarth, Christoph (2003): "A functional MRI study of the verbal transformation effect", In ICPhS-15, 1639-1642.