Sectioning with a Microtome

·      First open the valve to the CO2 tank and cool the stage until it is completely frozen.

·      Cut straight across the cerebellum so the brain can stay level and upright.

·      Apply 1% ethanol to the frozen stage as the base.

·      When the EtOH is halfway frozen, add a layer of 30% sucrose to the base.

·      When the sucrose is halfway frozen, place the brain so that the dorsal side will face towards the blade.

·      Add more sucrose around the tissue and allow it to freeze.

·      Manually lower or raise the stage so the tissue is below where the blade will run.

·      Place the blade in its designated space and tighten screws to hold the blade in place.

·      Obtain a brush to handle the tissue and sectioned dish full of distilled H2O to place tissue.

·      Begin Cutting tissue into sections of the desired thickness (50 microns) and fully extend cutting arm for automatic adjustments

·      When your done cutting, remove the blade, wash it with soap and water, then dry. Coat blade in oil to store until next use.

·      For mounting, place one section in dish of water, float to the top and place slide under tissue in water.

·      Using a brush, guide the tissue to its spot on the slide.

·      When done mounting, allow your tissue to dry before staining.

Staining

·      Start with 6 containers with 1 of them being placed behind others.

·      1st container add distilled water, second add 70% alcohol, third add absolute alcohol, 4th container add clear safe. 5th container add cresyl violet stain. Place 5th container in front of 1 so the order of the containers from left to right is 5, 1, 2, 3, 4 with a 6th on behind them that we haven’t touched yet.

·      Place slides with glass facing outwards into slots within first container (distilled water). Leave for 2 minutes.

·      Next, transfer slides to the 70% alcohol and leave for 2-4 minutes.

·      Then move to absolute alcohol to finish the dehydration process. Leave for about 5 minutes.

·      Transfer slides to clear safe. If you see something like smoke in the liquid, the slides aren’t fully dehydrated, and you need to put them back into the alcohol. Leave slides in clear safe for about 5 minutes or until tissue is fully cleared.

·      Move slides back into absolute alcohol for about 4 minutes. Then 70% alcohol for another 4 minutes, and distilled water for another 2 minutes.

·      Finally place slides into the cresyl violet stain. And leave for at least 10 minutes, but closer to 20.

·      While waiting add acid alcohol to the 6th container. And place this container between water and 70% alcohol. Order should be 5, 1, 6, 2, 3, 4

·      Add stains to the water container. When water changes color dump into waste bucket and refill it.

·      After sitting in water for a little move to the acid alcohol. Again, once you see color change dump acid alcohol into waste and then refill it.

·      Then move from acid alcohol to 70% alcohol and leave here for as long as you see necessary.

·      Then let sit in the absolute alcohol for a little before moving to clear safe.

·      Obtain enough color sleeps 1 for each slide you have.

·      Take slide out and make sure it has slide with the sections facing upwards. Hold this side angled a little bit away from you.

·      Take paremount and carefully apply with a one sided q-tip to edge facing away from you.

·      Take cover slip and hold it perpendicular to slide. Slowly slide it onto the slide and tap the edges to make sure they are even.

·      Repeat this with remaining slides and you are done.

·      Leave slides out on flat surface to dry.

Human Behavioral Observation

1)    Setting – Watching football on Sunday with all my friends I observed one of my friends who would never get off his phone.

2)    The behavior I was observing was how much time was spent looking at the phone between picking it up and putting it back down.

3)    I used duration recording because it works perfect with what I was doing. Every time my friend picked up his phone I set a timer, and stopped the timer once he put his phone down.

4)    Data:

Phone pickup        Duration ()

                         1                                 2 min 17 sec

            2                      23 sec

            3                      4 min 4 sec

            4                      42 sec

            5                      2 min 33 sec

            6                      1 min 21 sec

            7                      6 min 14 sec

            8                      19 sec

            9                      6 min 56 sec

            10                    4 min 47 sec

            11                    52 sec

            12                    9 min 20 sec

            13                    1 min 3 sec

Total: 40 min 51 sec

5)    Pertinent Information, Strengths & Weaknesses

Basically, the phone being in my friend’s hands was when I had the timer running, and I did not really account for him picking his head up at times, so his eyes were not glued to the phone screen for 40 minutes, but the phone was in his hands for that long. 

Strength – the data is concrete; the duration method gives a solid number, and nothing is really left up in the air when it comes to data.

Weakness – There are other variables like my friend picking his head up to watch football or talk to people in the room, but with the method being concrete I stuck to strictly timing when the phone was physically in his hands. That just has to be clarified when defining the method.

1)    Attention for speaking: domain-general control from the anterior cingulate cortex in spoken word production

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00832/full

The research looks at the neurological underpinnings of three attention-demanding tasks: 

manual object identification while ignoring spatial position, vocal color naming while

ignoring distractions, and vocal picture naming while ignoring distractions. Congruent and incongruent stimuli were used in all three tasks, and neutral stimuli were also used in PWI and Stroop. For each of the three tasks, the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex was observed to be active during incongruent trials, indicating that this area performs a domain-general attentional regulation role. This region exhibited enhanced activity for incongruent stimuli in the language tasks, which is compatible with the role of domain-general attentional control mechanisms in word creation. Additionally, the anterior-superior temporal gyrus showed activation. The results imply that speech activates the ACC as well. The research looks at the neurological underpinnings of three attention-demanding tasks: manual object identification while ignoring spatial position, vocal color naming while ignoring distractions, and vocal picture naming while ignoring distractions. Congruent and incongruent stimuli were used in all three tasks, and neutral stimuli were also used in PWI and Stroop. For each of the three tasks, the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex was observed to be active during incongruent trials, indicating that this area performs a domain-general attentional regulation role. This region exhibited enhanced activity for incongruent stimuli in the language tasks, which is compatible with the role of domain-general attentional control mechanisms in word creation. Additionally, the anterior-superior temporal gyrus showed activation. The results imply that speech activates the ACC as well. A region likely implementing domain-general attentional control. This suggests that in addition to engaging language-specific areas for core linguistic processes, speaking also engages the ACC, a region likely implementing domain-general attentional control.

2)    Detecting self-produced speech errors before and after articulation: an ERP investigation

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00763/full

It is thought that the same brain mechanism that keeps an eye on other kinds of action faults also keeps an eye on speech output problems. Although behavioral data indicates that speech mistakes can be identified and fixed before articulation, little is known about the brain underpinnings of this kind of pre-articulatory speech fault monitoring. This study used a phoneme-substitution task, which is known to cause speech problems, to investigate speech error monitoring. Pre-articulatory error monitoring was evaluated using stimulus-locked event-related potential studies that compared correct and incorrect utterances, while post-articulatory monitoring was evaluated using response-locked ERP analyses. The results of the study indicate that words that result in a speech error are linked to a bigger P2 component at midline sites, which may indicate that an error in speech formulation has been detected and is the cause of this early positive or a predictive mechanism to signal the potential for an upcoming speech error. The data also revealed that general conflict monitoring mechanisms are involved during this task, as both correct and incorrect responses elicited an anterior N2 component typically associated with conflict monitoring.

3)    Role of the lateral prefrontal cortex in speech monitoring

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00703/full

It is yet unknown how the lateral prefrontal cortex functions in speech monitoring. A recent study indicates that the error negativity, an event-related potential that peaks within 100 ms of the vocal onset, indicates that the medial frontal cortex is involved in overt speech monitoring that is started prior to auditory feedback. In healthy individuals, the Ne is bigger for incorrect trials than correct trials and is sensitive to the accuracy of the response. On the other hand, nonverbal monitoring tasks are difficult for patients with LPFC impairment, as evidenced by the lack of amplitude difference in the Ne recorded in correct versus incorrect trials. It's considered that interactions between the MFC and the LPFC are essential to regular action monitoring. A comparison of EEG activity and performance between aged-matched controls and patients with LPFC impairment while performing linguistic and non-linguistic tasks found that PFC patients had worse performance than controls in both tasks, but their Ne was larger for error than correct trials only in Naming. This suggests that LPFC may not be necessary for speech monitoring as assessed by simple picture naming.

4)    Self-, other-, and joint monitoring using forward models

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00132/full

Self-monitoring in linguistic psychology is frequently predicated on comprehension. In contrast, the alternate explanation put out in this work is by Pickering and Garrod, who contend that speakers create forward models of the utterances they will make and then compare them to the actual utterance as they are produced. They use the gap between the speech and the expected utterance to generate inverse models, which they use to adjust their production instructions or, on occasion, start over. By employing covert imitation and forward models to mimic other people's utterances, comprehenders mimic other people's speech and compare it to what they hear. They compute inverse models using the discrepancy and adjust their representation of the speaker's production command accordingly. In the paper, monitoring in conversation and paying attention to sequential contributions, concurrent feedback, and the relationship between monitoring and alignment are covered. The paper also discusses the importance of other-monitoring, which plays a more crucial role than self-monitoring in monologue or narrative comprehension.

5)    Mind what you say—general and specific mechanisms for monitoring in speech production

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00514/full

The process of producing speech is intricate and demands control over both our spontaneous and prepared speech. Studies have indicated that action monitoring and a production-specific internal monitor are two of the more general systems used in monitoring both internal and external speech. A domain general mechanism in the anterior cingulate cortex may be activated by rivalry between lexical-level representations, according to evidence from working memory requirements, electrophysiological investigations, and fMRI. More modern methods, however, have placed more emphasis on unique systems for keeping an eye on interior speech. Electrophysiological data, for instance, indicates that the comprehension system is engaged in both monitoring one's own speech production and that of others. Hearing one's own voice provided as feedback has a greater significance in monitoring since it gives one a feeling of agency and verifies the intended meaning. Overall, the articles in this special topic broaden the available evidence base and provide new theoretical perspectives on speech monitoring.

6)    ‘‘IF TWO WITCHES WOULD WATCH TWO WATCHES, WHICH WITCH WOULD WATCH WHICH WATCH?’’ TDCS OVER THE LEFT FRONTAL REGION MODULATES TONGUE TWISTER REPETITION IN HEALTHY SUBJECTS 

https://pdf.sciencedirectassets.com/271071/1-s2.0-S0306452213X00260/1-s2.0-S0306452213009019

Transcranial direct current stimulation has been demonstrated in recent research to influence cortical activity in the human brain. In the language arena, tDCS has been demonstrated to hasten the recuperation process for participants with left brain injury who are aphasic and to decrease voice reaction times in healthy persons. In a research, ten healthy participants were divided into three groups and given three distinct stimulation scenarios to repeat a list of tongue twisters: anodal transcranial magnetic stimulation over the left frontal region; cathodal transcranial stimulation over the same region; and sham stimulation. At the baseline, participants performed more accurately and quickly while repeating the stimuli with atDCS, but during cathodal tDCS, their accuracy and reaction times were considerably decreased. The influence of tDCS stimulation is examined on the performance of 30 healthy individuals in a repetition task of tongue twisters in this study. The researchers found that the left frontal region, including Broca's area, plays a crucial role in speech repetition, as it supports the rehearsal process. The study aimed to determine if excitatory or inhibitory tDCS could influence the performance of such a complex language task.

7)    Brain imaging of tongue-twister sentence comprehension: Twisting the tongue and the brain 

https://pdf.sciencedirectassets.com/272554/1-s2.0-S0093934X00X0123X/1-s2.0-S0093934X02005060

An investigation of the neurological underpinnings of the tongue-twister effect in sentence comprehension was conducted utilizing functional brain imaging. Participants quietly read sentences that were identical in terms of lexical frequency and syntactic structure but differed in terms of the percentage of initial phonemes shared by the words. The alteration changed the amount of activity observed in language-related cortical areas, reading speeds, and comprehension performance. The effect extended to cortical areas related to other elements of language processing, not just those involved in articulatory speech programming or rehearsal processes. There are two primary explanations for the tongue-twister effect: articulatory and memory-based. According to the articulatory explanation, the effect arises from a prelexical or lexical access bottleneck in subvocal phonological/articulatory processing, leading to a deficit in comprehension or memory maintenance. The memory-based account suggests that the difficulty of tongue-twister sentences is due to phonological similarities interfering with normal maintenance of the sentence's surface structure during syntactic and semantic comprehension. Both accounts have empirical support.

8)    THE IMPACT OF TASK DEMAND ON VISUAL WORD RECOGNITION 

https://pdf.sciencedirectassets.com/271071/1-s2.0-S0306452214X0014X

The hierarchy of complex properties in visually displayed words, ranging from individual letters to bigrams and morphemes, is perceptible to the left occipitotemporal cortex. It is yet unknown, though, if this sensitivity is a constant characteristic of the brain areas involved in word recognition. A study investigated how this sensitivity might change depending on the demands of the work. Participants completed lexical judgment tasks and symbol identification tasks while viewing real English words and stimuli with hierarchical word-likeness. The fronto-parietal and temporal areas showed significant activation during the two tasks, according to the results. Strong main effects were observed in the occipitotemporal cortex for task demand and stimulus type, while no sensitivity was shown for hierarchical word-likeness. According to a study by J. Yang et al. (2014), people's encounters with orthographies can alter the selectivity in the left fMRI region during word reading. The study involved Hebrew and non-Hebrew readers who visually processed English words, Hebrew words, Chinese characters, digital strings, and line drawings. The study found that the selectivity pattern in the visual word form area depends on participants' reading experience. The researchers suggest that the VWFA contains a representation based on neurons highly selective for individual words.

9)    Mismatched Crowdsourcing based Language Perception for Under-resourced Languages 

https://pdf.sciencedirectassets.com/280203/1-s2.0-S1877050916X0004X/1-s2.0-S1877050916300394

Mismatched crowdsourcing is a method that involves hiring transcribers whose native language is not Mandarin Chinese to obtain training data for automatic voice recognition systems in languages that have limited resources. For the first time, transcribers who speak Mandarin Chinese as their second language are being recruited for this study. These data are used to develop statistical models of transcribers' cross-language perception of phonemes and tones. The impact of various native languages on transcribers' performances is assessed by the researchers through the analysis of phonetic and tonal variation mappings and coverages in comparison to a target language dictionary. The study focuses on mismatched crowdsourcing efforts with under-resourced languages, Cantonese and Vietnamese. Ten English speakers chosen at random and six Mandarin speakers who worked consistently made up the two groups of crowd workers. Speech samples from the Australian Special Broadcasting Service were transcribed by the Mandarin speakers, while the English speakers used nonsense syllables. The study compared the Mandarin and English mismatched crowdsourcing data collected from Upwork and Mechanical Turk. The top three most common phone confusions were found to be largely dependent on the transcribers, while the English data from MTurk had more uncontrolled usage of Pinyin symbols and varying word coverage.

10) Slip of the tongue: Implications for evolution and language development 

https://pdf.sciencedirectassets.com/271061/1-s2.0-S0010027715X00060/1-s2.0-S0010027715000840

The pace of tongue protrusions was shown to be impacted by the motor demands of the activity, and tongue protrusions were strongly right-biased for precision manual motor action, according to a study on the condition in 4-year-old children who were otherwise growing. This implies that the evolution of human language and motor development could be explained by tongue protrusions. One of the biggest muscles in the body, the tongue is essential for gustation, swallowing, and mastiction. In addition, it participates in phonetic articulation in a secondary capacity and activates during nonverbal synchronization with manual motor tasks. Tongue push, sometimes referred to as "tongue thrust," is seen as an orofacial muscle imbalance and is commonly linked to psychopathology. There is evidence of tongue protrusion in patients with dystonia, Down's syndrome, Rett syndrome, Tourette's syndrome, Angelman syndrome, and children with non-organic failure to thrive. Theories regarding the evolutionary and developmental basis of tongue protrusions during tasks of concentration range from motor overflow during attentional processes to the physical rejeccing of the bottle or breast by infants to indicate satiation.

11) Effects of auditory enhancement on the loudness of masker and target components 

https://pdf.sciencedirectassets.com/271141/1-s2.0-S0378595516X00020/1-s2.0-S0378595515301568

The study investigates how auditory enhancement affects the target and masker components' loudness. It was discovered that the precursor amplifies the signal's loudness while the masker is present, without altering the loudness of the masker in the immediate vicinity. The auditory system adjusts to long-term spectral qualities and changes in relation to the long-term spectrum of previous sounds, which leads to the auditory enhancement effect. This improvement can be explained as part of a normalizing process that could contribute to the establishment of auditory perceptual invariance when confronted with various talkers, shifting acoustic settings, and fluctuating background noise. Adaptation is one potential neural implementation of hearing amplification, in which neurons fire in the most stimulated spectrum regions. That adaptation leads to a reduced neural response to the masker but not the signal. The study investigates enhancement in terms of changes in loudness produced by preceding stimuli, which have been studied over many decades. Loudness enhancement, loudness decrease, loudness recalibration, and loudness context effects have little or no relation to auditory enhancement effects.

12) P198 tDCS stimulation of the left inferior frontal gyrus in a connected speech task with fluent speakers

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1388245716308938

Research has indicated that transcranial direct current stimulation has an impact on participants' tongue twister phrase production, which is a type of connected speech. The results of the study, which lay the groundwork for future investigations into articulatory problems like stuttering, showed that anodal stimulation accelerated vocal reaction times both during and after stimulation.

13) Speech monitoring and phonologically-mediated eye gaze in language perception and production: a comparison using printed word eye-tracking

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00818/full

The Loop of Perception According to the theory of speech monitoring, speakers examine their inner speech on a regular basis. Additionally, during language production, listening to one's own speech causes eye movements to phonologically related printed words that have a similar time course to listening to someone else's speech. This implies that speakers listen to their own overt speech via their speech perception system, but not to their inner speech. There isn't, however, a direct comparison of perception and production using the same stimuli and subjects. The current printed word eye-tracking experiment combined perception and production using a within-subjects approach. Four words were displayed on the displays, one of which, the target, had to be named or given verbally. The words that accompanied the target were either unrelated, semantically linked, or phonologically related. There were small increases in looks to phonological competitors with a similar time-course in both production and perception. Phonological effects in perception however lasted longer and had a much larger magnitude.

14) Twisting tongues to test for conflict-monitoring in speech production

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00206/full

According to recent research, monitoring during speech production might be carried out by domain-general processes that identify response conflict. It has been regularly observed that tasks that induce conflict, like the flanker task, generate two ERP components. To determine whether a common response conflict monitor oversees monitoring in speech and non-speech tasks, this study used electrophysiological markers. Participants completed a manual flanker task and a tongue twister task while having their electroencephalography recorded. The behavioral data demonstrated the normal effects of both tasks: for TT trials compared to non-TT trials, and for incongruent flanker trials compared to congruent flanker trials, there were higher error rates and slower speech initiation times. Stimulus-locked EEG assessments of the flanker task confirmed earlier findings, with a higher N2 for incongruent than for congruent trials and a response-locked ERN. Correlation across these measures showed some correlations within a task, but little evidence of systematic cross-task correlation. Although the present results do not speak against conflict signals from the production system serving as cues to self-monitoring, they are not consistent with signatures of response conflict being mediated by a single, domain-general conflict monitor.

15) Lexical selection in the semantically blocked cyclic naming task: the role of cognitive control and learning

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00009/full

This study examines the association between the level of semantic interference in a blocked cyclic naming task and the cognitive control abilities of younger and older persons. It predicts a greater rise in semantic interference in naming for people with weaker working memory capacity, a lesser ability to regulate distracting reactions, and a lesser ability to resolve proactive interference; the effects are larger for older adults. Nevertheless, rather than the total amount of semantic interference in the naming task, it was discovered that measures of cognitive control were related to certain indices of semantic interference. Word span for both related and unrelated situations was inversely linked with the rise in naming latencies across naming trials within a cycle, indicating a method of limiting response options based upon memory for the set of item names. Evidence for a role of inhibition in response selection was obtained, as Stroop interference correlated positively with the change in naming latencies across cycles for the related condition.

Anxiety will be measured on a percentage scale. The amount of time a mice spends near the wall will be divided by the total time in the open field, and that number will be recorded as a percent. To be considered near the wall the mice has to be within a mouse length of the wall. So if there is room for another mouse to be between the experimental mouse and the wall then it is not considered near the wall. There is a visable shadow that goes around the inside of the wall that is about the same size and can be used for visual reference, but it is not 100% consistent around the entire circle. Also all the mice spent around 5 minutes in the experiment, so that will be used as the denominator for creating percentages.

                                               Time spent near wall                   Anxiety percentage

PT_OF_M.11.15    3 min 17 sec=3.28 min                    65.6%

PT_OF_M.11.16    3 min 40 sec=3.66 min                    73.2%

PT_OF_F.11.19     3 min 5 sec=3.08 min                      61.6%

PT_OF_F.11.14     2 min 31 sec=2.52 min                    50.4%

Forced Swim Test

1)    The Forced Swim Test is used to look for depressive states or behavioral despair in rodents. It works by putting the rodent in water that is too deep for it to stand so it must swim to stay alive. All that is really needed for this is cylindrical container like a beaker full of room temperature water that the rodent cannot escape from forcing the rodent to swim. The rodent will be plopped in the water, and at first the rodent should be frantic and swim for its life with vigorous motions trying to escape. After a while of swimming the rodent will sit still with just its head floating out of the water. This action shows that the rodent has given up, and it is assumed that the rodent is depressed. This test is mainly used to test anti-depressant drugs to be given to humans. The longer a rodent fight for its life the less depressed it is, and the better the anti-depressant drug is working.

2)    My opinion on this method is that it puts unnecessary stress on the animal, and it is not 100% accurate. I feel like the time a rat is swimming really depends on the rat itself, and it could be unique for each rat. Some rats can have more endurance than others, some rats could’ve eaten a big meal which will make it tired more easily, some rats could’ve just woken up and it might be lethargic. I just feel like there is so much more to this experiment than to just assume it is depressed because it stopped swimming. Also, a rat might be smart enough to put itself in a floating position where it is not wasting energy that doesn’t necessarily mean it is depressed. I think a better test for depression would be to measure how eager or excited a rat is for food or to complete a maze with food at the end. I think this is more humane, and it applies to the real world because people who are depressed may not eat as much, and they might not be eager or excited to do a lot.

Program of Research Report

Author: Benjamin Stahl

Dr Benjamin Stahl holds a PhD in Clinical Neuroscience (2013) from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, as well as a Diploma in Psychology (2009) from Freie Universität Berlin. He conducted a series of randomized controlled trials on the rehabilitation of post-stroke chronic aphasia at the Freie Universität Berlin from 2013 to 2016. He now serves as a postdoctoral researcher at the Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin and at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig.

Research Interests include: 

Speech and Language Disorders after Stroke, Neural Bases of Everyday Communication, Rhythmic Pacing in Stroke Rehabilitation, Intensive Language-Action Therapy, Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy

Rhythm in disguise: why singing may not hold the key to recovery from aphasia

https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/134/10/3083/324095

According to a research by Stefan Geyer, Robert Turner, Sonja A. Kotz, Benjamin Stahl, and Ilona Henseler at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, rhythm may be essential for speech production in non-fluent aphasics, especially for those with basal ganglia-related lesions. Lesions in the basal ganglia were shown to be responsible for more than half of the variation in rhythmicity. The results imply that rhythm may be the underlying cause of advantages that were previously linked to melodic intoning. Speech recovery has been linked to the use of melodic intonation therapy, which activates cortical regions in the right hemisphere. Cross-sectional research including non-fluent aphasics, however, have not been able to demonstrate its efficacy in contrast to natural or rhythmic speech. Research on neuroimaging has produced ambiguous results, with some suggesting structural changes in the right arcuate fasciculus and benefits in speech production due to massive repetition of phrases. The role of rhythm in speech recovery from aphasia has been neglected, with natural speech being chosen as a control.

How to engage the right brain hemisphere in aphasics without even singing: evidence for two paths of speech recovery

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00035/full

The question of whether singing stimulates the right hemisphere and helps patients with left-hemisphere stroke recover from non-fluent aphasia has been discussed for a long time. According to recent study, rhythm and lyric type—rather than singing itself—may help non-fluent aphasic people produce speech. It is entirely unknown how melody and rhythm may affect speech recovery in the long run. Fifteen individuals with persistent non-fluent aphasia participated in an experiment where they received standard speech treatment, rhythmic therapy, or singing therapy. The findings offer the first indication that rhythmic speaking and singing could be equally beneficial in treating non-fluent aphasia. The hypothesis that singing results in a transfer of language function from the left to the right hemisphere may be called into question by this discovery. Patients receiving both singing and rhythmic treatment made good progress in the production of common, formulaic phrases, known to be supported by right corticostriatal brain areas. The combined use of standard therapy and the training of formulaic phrases may open new ways of tapping into right-hemisphere language resources, even without singing.

Tapping into neural resources of communication: formulaic language in aphasia therapy

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01526/full

Speech-language therapy frequently employs formulaic terms, which are essential in spoken language in daily life. They are intimately tied to the communicative-pragmatic environment, have a set form, and frequently have nonliteral meanings. Both bilateral basal ganglia and cortical regions in the right hemisphere are involved in the processing of conversational speech formulas. Using a vocabulary of formulaic terms, people with classical speech and language problems frequently communicate reasonably well. Speech-language pathologists that use utterance-oriented techniques include those that use music-based rehabilitation programs like Melodic Intonation Therapy, which asks patients to form words and phrases using various modalities. Still, these programs do not consistently gain from the turn-taking framework that permeates ordinary speech. Therapeutic language games are one example of a communicative-pragmatic method that aims to learn verbal phrases in contexts that are relevant to behavior. These games don't place as much emphasis on articulation of sentences and phrases and on their suitability in communicative-pragmatic context. Examples of communicative-pragmatic approaches include Intensive Language-Action Therapy, which requires up to three individuals with aphasia and a therapist to obtain picture cards from each other.

-       All papers are under the same umbrella of language and treating of aphasia. The first paper kind of disproves the common thought that singing, and rhythm is the best for treating aphasia. The second kind of zooms in a little more doing tests on standard speech treatment vs music therapy, proving that standard speech treatment is still better. The third article dives deeper into standard speech treatment. At this point the research has fully strayed away from the rhythm and music.

MOTW#1

Preservation of singing in Broca's aphasia. https://jnnp.bmj.com/content/jnnp/40/3/221.full.pdf

The study by A. Yamadori, Y. Osumi, S. Masuhara, and M. Okubo, conducted at Kobe University School of Medicine, focuses on the preservation of singing ability in patients with Broca's aphasia. They examined 24 right-handed, right hemiparetic patients with Broca's aphasia and found that 87.5% of them demonstrated preserved singing capacity. Among these patients, 57% were able to produce text words while singing. The study suggests that the right hemisphere may play a dominant role in singing capacity and discusses the relationship between melodic and text singing. It also touches upon historical cases and literature related to the preservation of singing in aphasic patients. Overall, the study highlights the intriguing connection between singing and language abilities in individuals with aphasia.

MOTW #2

Redefining the role of Broca’s area in speech https://www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10.1073/pnas.1414491112

            Broca’s area plays a huge role in speech and word production. Neuroscientists have been debating the exact role of the Broca’s area for some time now. There are plenty of theories which state that the purpose of Broca’s area has something to do with phonological processing, articulatory encoding, and articulator coordination. Research for the Broca’s area has relied on neuroimaging and electrophysiological techniques. With these techniques there was a lack in precise spatial temporal data. In this research scientists utilized intracranial cortical recordings to investigate neural processes underlying spoken word production. The study found a temporal cascade of neural activity during word production tasks which starts with sensory representations in the temporal cortex and proceeds to articulatory gestures in the motor cortex. This is the activation cascade. They found the role of Broca’s area to contradict traditional beliefs. Their results showed that it was silent during the actual articulation process. The Broca’s area activated in the early stages of word production which means it is involved in articulatory encoding. The next finding was that the Broca’s area was a key node for coordinating the transformation of information across large-scale cortical networks involved in spoken word production before articulation. When participants in the study produced novel strings of articulatory gestures in response to non-word stimuli the Broca’s area showed a lot of activity which means it is engaged in articulatory encoding of combinations. Overall, the study showed that instead of activating during the actual act of speaking the Broca’s area does all of its work by encoding articulatory codes right before actually speaking.

MOTW #3

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/hbm.25254

Functional neuroanatomy of language without speech: An ALE meta-analysis of sign language.

            The study utilized the SL comprehension foci dataset and ALE algorithm to investigate spatial convergence in sign language comprehension. Analysis involved examining lateralization indices and contrast/conjunction analyses between sign language comprehension and observation of sing language like action. There were a lot of findings in the study having to do with the Broca’s area and sign language. The study suggests that sign language research can help us understand language capacity beyond just speaking. Broca’s area in the left interior frontal gyrus is a crucial hub in the language network, actively processing linguistic information across various language modalities which include not only speech, but also writing and sign language. A list of the key findings: Neural Response during sign language comprehension, Lateralization of sign language comprehension, functional asymmetry in interior frontal gyrus, functional specialization in the language network, subregional specializations in middle frontal gyrus and precentral gyrus, role of posterior temporal cortex (processing linguistic information while other regions handled modality specific info).

MOTW #4

Broca’s area – Thalamic connectivity

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0093934X14001850

A study examines the ventral anterior nucleus and pulvinar's structural connections to Broca's region and the thalamus. The study's findings reveal a local Broca's area-thalamus network that may be engaged in linguistic processing by showing direct connections between Broca's area and these thalamic nuclei. During lexical-semantic processing, thalamic connection may draw on cortical areas that store the multimodal characteristics of lexical objects and connect them. Recent research demonstrates that the functions provided by the Broca's and Wernicke's areas (classical language regions) are more complicated and numerous than previously thought. The Broca's area and surrounding cortices are not just engaged in speech production; they also function as a sophisticated neuronal cluster that processes semantic, phonological, and grammatical information as well as working memory and interpreting and imitating actions. The study looks into the structural connections between the thalamus and Broca's area to two thalamic nuclei: the ventral anterior nucleus and the pulvinar. These nuclei have been implicated in linguistic functions similar to those served by BA 44 and 45. The researchers hypothesize that both ventral anterior nucleus and the pulvinar share direct structural connectivity with Broca's area.

MOTW #5

Role of Broca’s area in encoding sequential human actions: a virtual lesion study

https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=2f0878d7fe45f5824d274580d3c8dbdd0c946499

A virtual lesion affects an individual's performance solely for biological acts, notably object-oriented syntactic actions, according to a study that used transcranial magnetic stimulation to disrupt the left Broca's area (BA44) in 13 healthy people. This finding shows that the complicated human movement encoding process, which may be essential for language, memory, math, and music processing, is mediated by the Broca's region. The study also discovered that while this skill was retained for nonbiological events, patients with a Broca's region lesion had difficulties when it came to rearranging photographs of human acts. An experiment was conducted on 13 right-handed participants to see how transcranial stimulation (TMS) affected their reaction speeds. Rearranging three images from a film of human or non-biological actions was the task. Participants were instructed to point their right index finger toward the middle of the sequence, with the error rate and reaction time recorded for off-line analysis. The experiment was conducted on a personal computer connected to a touch-sensitive screen and controlled by a custom-made program running under LabVIEW.

MOTW #6

Broca's Area and the Language Instinct

https://courses.washington.edu/ccab/Musso%20et%20al%20-%20language%20instinct%20-%20Nat%20NS%202003.pdf

Darwin argues that language is an instinct, but the capacity to learn a language is a special and fundamental human attribute. Youngsters pick up mental grammar on their own by listening to their parents talk. Chomsky suggested that an innate set of mental calculations is needed in order to generalize from a sample of sentences to language as a whole. This shared grammar of all languages points to a pre-existing brain structure. Multiple functional neuroimaging investigations have demonstrated that an overlapping brain representation is used for both languages in those who learned both before reaching a "critical age." The system underpinning the development of new linguistic competence in two, but parametrically distinct, languages Italian and Japanese was examined in this work. The brain system should only be involved in language acquisition when the new language is based on the principles of UG. The neural correlate of acquiring new linguistic competence was investigated with two functional magnetic resonance imaging studies. The second fMRI study involved 11 native German speakers learning Japanese, with subjects screened for cognitive impairment.

Motor skill for tool-use is associated with asymmetries in Broca’s area and the motor hand area of the precentral gyrus in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes)

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166432816309743

According to research by William D. Hopkins and colleagues, in chimpanzees, asymmetries in Broca's region and the motor hand area of the precentral gyrus are related to motor competence for tool usage. According to the study, chimpanzee hand preference and hand skill are only weakly related, while variations in hand skill are linked to asymmetry in the premotor and primary cortex. However, anatomical asymmetries were not linked to hand preference for tool use. The study also discovered that when compared to men, women have better motor control of their right hand. According to the study, higher left hemisphere motor skill specialization was linked to the evolution of tool use. According to the researchers, lateralization in motor planning rather than hand preference in general was chosen.

Bidirectional connectivity between Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area during interactive verbal communication

https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/brain.2020.0790

The brain processes that govern live and organic interactions during spoken discussion between two people are examined in this work. The basic premise is that social contact will alter the functional connections between canonical speech regions in the human brain. When comparing the directional connection between Broca's and Wernicke's Areas during verbal situations that included both interactive and non-interactive communication, the researchers used Granger causality. During hyper scanning with functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), 33 pairs of healthy adult participants alternated speaking and listening to one other while completing an object name and description task that was either interactive or not. Without taking into account the partner's description, the speaker in the non-interactive condition named and described a picture-object. The speaker completed the identical work but added information during the interactive condition.

Speed of Lexical Activation in Nonfluent Broca’s Aphasia and Fluent Wernicke’s Aphasia 

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0093934X9791751X

The study focuses on how quickly words are activated in nonfluent Wernicke's aphasic patients and those with Broca's aphasia. The researchers discovered that Broca's aphasic patients exhibit uneven lexical priming, not a lack of it, and that there is little agreement regarding the circumstances in which they prime and do not prime. The main issue with Broca's lexical activation has to do with its rate of activation. Patients with Broca's aphasia reach their peak when enough time is given for activation to spread across companions. A list priming paradigm was used to study the time history of lexical activation in order to test this "slowed activation" hypothesis. The intervals between words were spaced 300 to 2100 msec apart. Despite being of distinct types, both patients showed aberrant priming patterns. The Broca's aphasic individual demonstrated trustworthy automatic priming but only at a long ISI of 1500 msec. The Wernicke's aphasic subject showed normally rapid initial activation but continued to show priming over an abnormally long range of delays, suggesting failure to dampen activation and might explain the semantic confusion exhibited by fluent Wernicke's patients.

Reduced perfusion in Broca's area in developmental stuttering

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/hbm.23487?casa_token=_h1U_ZGSwq4AAAAA:WEDYQdrfZiOsDf2pXw6AKcTVDfrOYDAHVElyxqaEpuLdbH6x2-7-ko5HcIUUs21fzs0aO8R_FO-zhYU

Reduced regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) at rest was found in the stuttering group compared to healthy controls in a study involving 26 people with developmental stuttering and 36 healthy controls. The research discovered that rCBF values in Broca's area expanded posteriorly into other regions of the language loop and bilaterally linked inversely with the degree of stuttering. In addition, the stuttering group had higher rCBF than healthy controls in the cerebellar nuclei and parietal cortex. When participants with coexisting conditions or those taking medication were excluded, the results remained identical in analyses that only included children. In addition to the underlying trait drop in rCBF relative to control values, more severe stuttering was linked to even higher reductions in rCBF to Broca's area. higher rCBF anomaly in the posterior language loop was associated with more severe symptoms, suggesting a common pathophysiology throughout the language loop likely contributes to stuttering severity.

Activation of Broca’s area during the production of spoken and signed language: a combined cytoarchitectonic mapping and PET analysis 

https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=aca95f6407eb3fe39d088f3c9bf01d8a8fcd70df

In bilingual people who have been proficient in both American Sign linguistic (ASL) and English since early childhood, both speaking and signing during the development of linguistic narratives activate Broca's region, which is located in the inferior frontal gyrus. The work integrates functional neuroimaging data collected by PET with probabilistic maps of these two regions. It is discovered that complicated articulatory motions of the oral/laryngeal or limb muscles activate BA45, not BA44. A group of monolingual English-speaking subjects exhibit the same patterns of activity when producing oral language. These results suggest that BA45 is the region of Broca's area that is crucial for the components of language generation that are independent of modality. The survey also discovered that Broca's area's boundaries are vague.

Speech-associated gestures, Broca’s area, and the human mirror system 

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0093934X07000442?casa_token=8hJx4KQYu-IAAAAA:DFBSHEVJvYQIq03rdG1T3F6iQr8pavgm-_Wg5ayzqO68Yx1NFownhhbz__i7ecayLQG04dnyPw

Speech-associated gestures are hand and arm movements that operate as both actions and means of communicating semantic information to listeners. It is believed that these motions heavily involve Broca's region, which is involved in semantic retrieval or selection and action recognition. The functional connection of Broca's area with other cortical regions was examined in a study where individuals saw meaningful speech-associated gestures, speech-unrelated self-grooming hand movements, or no hand movements while listening to stories. A network analysis of neuroimaging data revealed that interactions between Broca's area and other cortical areas were strongest when spoken language was accompanied by self-grooming hand movements or no hand movements at all, and weakest when spoken language was accompanied by meaningful speech-associated gestures. The study also covered the significance of the human mirror.

Brain imaging of tongue-twister sentence comprehension: Twisting the tongue and the brain 

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0093934X02005060?casa_token=DBUMOj7bb0sAAAAA:om2wq7pLuO7AzNeUyMmyQEJPrcrQawDOUaWv1V13qFR21loey_K1aMf5B3TzyqhKRr0rhg0d_A

An investigation into the neurological underpinnings of the tongue-twister effect in sentence comprehension used functional brain imaging (fMRI). Participants quietly read sentences that were comparable in terms of lexical frequency and grammatical structure, but varied in the percentage of words that shared the same starting phonemes. The alteration altered reading speed and comprehension abilities as well as the degree of brain activation in areas associated to language. The effect extended to cortical regions linked to various aspects of language processing and was not limited to those involved in articulatory speech programming or rehearsal processes. There are two basic explanations for the tongue-twister effect: articulatory-based and memory-based. According to the articulatory account, the impact is caused by a bottleneck in prelexical or lexical access subvocal phonological/articulatory processing. This leads to a deficit in comprehension or memory maintenance. The memory-based account suggests that the difficulty of tongue-twister sentences is due to phonological similarities interfering with normal maintenance of the sentence's surface structure during syntactic and semantic comprehension. Both accounts have empirical support.

The retrieval of syntax in Broca's aphasia

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0093934X75800836

The study investigates how Broca's Aphasia, a disorder marked by agrammatism, retrieves syntax. According to the study, Broca's aphasics frequently utilize stressed words or fake vocatives to make up for the fact that early unstressed functors are particularly sensitive. A halting speech pattern and a breakdown of grammatical rules are two features of the condition. USPH Grants NS 07615 to Clark University and NS 06209 to Boston University can help fund research on the language basis of speech disorders. Pronouns and other grammatical function words are used less frequently in free discourse, according to statistical studies, than contentives. The first 14 grammatical morphemes that children learn are available to agrammatics in a different order from how they were acquired by the youngster. The sequence of availability for aphasics seems best predicted by the frequency of occasions for their use in conversation. Goodglass, Fodor, and Schulhoff (1967) found that the omission of grammatical functors by Broca's aphasics was a function of the sentence position and the stress falling on these words. The Story Completion Test was devised to explore more fully the linguistic status in Broca's aphasia.

Aphasia Therapy on a Neuroscience Basis

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/02687030701612213

A study published in Aphasiology by Friedemann Pulvermüller and Marcelo L. Berthier emphasizes the value of neuroscience in language therapy. They discovered that patients with chronic aphasia dramatically improved their language functioning with intense language-action therapy (ILAT), specifically constraint-induced aphasia therapy. The study makes the case for pharmacological therapy as a potential addition to speech-language therapy when combined with behavioral therapy. According to the study's findings, ILAT is a useful technique for enhancing language abilities even in chronic stages of aphasia, providing fresh avenues for investigation into the plasticity of human language circuits. Understanding how language functions in the human brain is now significantly better thanks to research in cognitive neuroscience of language. This information might help patients with aphasia have better lives. training in language using neuroscience can improve even chronic aphasia patients. The application of neuroscience knowledge in aphasia therapy can be beneficial at present and may lead to new perspectives in the future. Neuroimaging technology can provide unique insights into cortical reorganization processes related to language.

Intensive therapy induces contralateral white matter changes in chronic stroke patients with Broca’s aphasia. 

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0093934X14000509?casa_token=WO455l-YV8IAAAAA:MiNDDlt8IQEnLFfvBzlN4dArxoU2Q6QrM5uBD5trFC_cNe0YXUFO2YWriE8qwR26arcYY3DmHw

A rigorous rehabilitation program for people with nonfluent aphasia resulted in structural alterations in the right hemisphere, which were associated with increases in speech output, according to a study employing diffusion tensor imaging (DTI). The right inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), right posterior superior temporal gyrus, and right posterior cingulum all displayed reduced fractional anisotropy in the treated group, according to the study. Furthermore, bigger reductions in FA in the right IFG (pars opercularis) were linked to greater gains in speech output. According to the research, nonfluent aphasia patients who underwent intense rehabilitation programs experienced structural changes in their right hemisphere that were associated to increases in their ability to produce speech. According to the research, patients' verbal communication can be improved with intense therapy, but the neural processes underlying successful treatment remain poorly understood. Participants were scanned using a scanner and analyzed using FSL. Data was processed to generate a diffusion tensor model, which was then registered to FSL's FA template. The study found reductions in FA in seven clusters in the treated group, indicating improvements in speech output.