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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access published online on March 17, 2009
Cerebral Cortex, doi:10.1093/cercor/bhp023
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© 2009 The Authors
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Structural Correlates of Semantic and Phonemic Fluency Ability in First and Second Languages

Alice Grogan1, David W. Green2, Nilufa Ali2, Jenny T. Crinion1 and Cathy J. Price1

1 Wellcome Department of Imaging Neuroscience, Institute of Neurology, University College London, London WC1N 3BG, UK, 2 Research Department of Cognitive, Perceptual and Brain Sciences, University College London, London WC1E 6BT, UK

Address Correspondence to Cathy J. Price, Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, 12 Queen Square, London WC1N 3BG, UK. Email: c.price{at}fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk.

Category and letter fluency tasks are commonly used clinically to investigate the semantic and phonological processes central to speech production, but the neural correlates of these processes are difficult to establish with functional neuroimaging because of the relatively unconstrained nature of the tasks. This study investigated whether differential performance on semantic (category) and phonemic (letter) fluency in neurologically normal participants was reflected in regional gray matter density. The participants were 59 highly proficient speakers of 2 languages. Our findings corroborate the importance of the left inferior temporal cortex in semantic relative to phonemic fluency and show this effect to be the same in a first language (L1) and second language (L2). Additionally, we show that the pre-supplementary motor area (pre-SMA) and head of caudate bilaterally are associated with phonemic more than semantic fluency, and this effect is stronger for L2 than L1 in the caudate nuclei. To further validate these structural results, we reanalyzed previously reported functional data and found that pre-SMA and left caudate activation was higher for phonemic than semantic fluency. On the basis of our findings, we also predict that lesions to the pre-SMA and caudate nuclei may have a greater impact on phonemic than semantic fluency, particularly in L2 speakers.

Key Words: bilingual • MRI • phonological • semantic • verbal fluency


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