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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access originally published online on July 10, 2006
Cerebral Cortex 2007 17(5):1173-1178; doi:10.1093/cercor/bhl028
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© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

What the Brain Does before the Tongue Slips

Jürn Möller1, Bernadette M. Jansma2, Antoni Rodriguez-Fornells3 and Thomas F. Münte1

1 Department of Neuropsychology, Otto von Guericke University, 39106 Magdeburg, Germany, 2 Faculty of Psychology, Department of Neurocognition, University of Maastricht, The Netherlands, 3 Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats and Faculty of Psychology, University of Barcelona, 08035 Barcelona, Spain

Address correspondence to Thomas F. Münte, MD, Department of Neuropsychology, Otto von Guericke University, Universitätsplatz 2, Gebäude 24, 39106 Magdeburg, Germany. Email: thomas.muente{at}med.uni-magdeburg.de.

Speech production is an extremely rapid and seemingly effortless process with speech errors in normal subjects being rare. Although psycholinguistic models incorporate elaborate monitoring mechanisms to prevent and correct errors, the brain regions involved in their commitment, detection, and correction have remained elusive. Using event-related brain potentials in a task known to elicit spoonerisms representing a special class of sound errors, we show specific brain activity prior to the vocalization of such spoonerisms. Source modeling localized this activity to the supplementary motor area in medial frontal cortex. We propose that this activity reflects the simultaneous activation of 2 competing speech plans on processing levels related to the construction of a rather "phonetic" speech plan contrasting with the traditional view, assuming the substitution of abstract phonological representations as the main source for sound errors.

Key Words: brain potentials • slips of the tongue • speech errors • speech production • supplementary motor area


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M. H. Ruiz, H.-C. Jabusch, and E. Altenmuller
Detecting Wrong Notes in Advance: Neuronal Correlates of Error Monitoring in Pianists
Cereb Cortex, March 10, 2009; (2009) bhp021v1.
[Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]


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