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Abstract:
Covert or overt production of words in reading or picture
naming paradigms tends to produce the most robust BOLD (Blood
Oxygenation Level Dependent) response in inferior temporal regions
bilaterally and left inferior frontal regions, while comprehension
of words, sentences, or larger discourse fragments reliably evokes
activation in left-lateralized superior temporal and inferior
frontal regions. However, inter-subject variability in the extent
and location of activation patterns in such tasks is incompletely
understood, as is the extent of overlap in individual subjects'
activation profiles across such comprehension and production tasks.
We present fMRI data from adults performing 1) covert or overt
picture naming, and 2) complex sentence interpretation. In the
picture naming task, subjects named black and white line drawings,
while in the sentence interpretation task, subjects heard either
syntactically simple or complex sentences and pressed a button to
indicate the agent in the sentence. We compare task-correlated
activation in individual subjects to cross-subject averages
produced by 1) linear warping of each brain to the standard
Talairach coordinate space, and 2) non-linear high-resolution
warping of each brain's sulcal topography to the group average. We
discuss the impact of our results for both fMRI methodology and for
theories of language processing.
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