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The sentence verification task: a reliable fMRI protocol for mapping receptive language in individual subjects

  • Magnetic resonance
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Abstract

Objective:

To test the capacity of a sentence verification (SV) task to reliably activate receptive language areas. Presurgical evaluation of language is useful in predicting postsurgical deficits in patients who are candidates for neurosurgery. Productive language tasks have been successfully elaborated, but more conflicting results have been found in receptive language mapping.

Materials and methods:

Twenty-two right-handed healthy controls made true-false semantic judgements of brief sentences presented auditorily.

Results:

Group maps showed reliable functional activations in the frontal and temporoparietal language areas. At the individual level, the SV task showed activation located in receptive language areas in 100% of the participants with strong left-sided distributions (mean lateralisation index of 69.27).

Conclusion:

The SV task can be considered a useful tool in evaluating receptive language function in individual subjects. This study is a first step towards designing the fMRI task which may serve to presurgically map receptive language functions.

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Acknowledgements

This study was supported by an FPU scholarship to AS from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology, and two grants to CA from the BrainGlot Project (funded by the Consolider-Ingenio 2010 programme) and the Generalitat Valenciana to encourage research in the healthcare system.

Conflict of interest statement

We declare that we have no conflict of interest.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departamento de Psicología Básica, Clínica y Psicobiología, Universitat Jaume I, Avda. Sos Baynat, s/n, 12071, Castellón de la Plana, Spain

    Ana Sanjuán, Cristina Forn, Noelia Ventura-Campos, Aina Rodríguez-Pujadas, María García-Porcar & César Ávila

  2. Eresa, Servicio de Radiología, Hospital La Fe, Valencia, Spain

    Vicente Belloch

  3. Unidad de Epilepsia, Servicio de Neurología, Hospital La Fe, Valencia, Spain

    Ana Sanjuán, Vicente Villanueva & César Ávila

Authors
  1. Ana Sanjuán
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  2. Cristina Forn
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  3. Noelia Ventura-Campos
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  4. Aina Rodríguez-Pujadas
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  5. María García-Porcar
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  6. Vicente Belloch
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  7. Vicente Villanueva
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  8. César Ávila
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ana Sanjuán.

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Sanjuán, A., Forn, C., Ventura-Campos, N. et al. The sentence verification task: a reliable fMRI protocol for mapping receptive language in individual subjects. Eur Radiol 20, 2432–2438 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00330-010-1814-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00330-010-1814-7

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