Broca's Area and the Discrimination of Frequency Transitions: A Functional MRI Study

The left inferior frontal lobe has been traditionally viewed as a "language area," although its involvement in the discrimination of rapid nonverbal frequency changes has been also shown. Using functional MRI, we studied seven healthy adults during discrimination of relatively slow (200 ms) tonal frequency glides. Compared to a control task, in which subjects indiscriminately responded to white noise bursts, tonal discrimination was associated with bilateral superior and middle temporal and medial frontal activations. Inferior frontal activations were bilateral, but stronger on the left. Contrary to previous studies comparing discrimination of slow frequency changes to rest, our results suggest that such discriminations-when compared to an auditory control task-activate the left inferior frontal gyrus. Our findings are consistent with a participation of Broca's area in nonlinguistic processes besides its known roles in semantic, syntactic, and phonological functions.

[1]  P. Broca.  Remarques sur le siège de la faculté du langage articulé, suivies d'une observation d'aphémie (perte de la parole) , 1861 .

[2]  M. Torrens.  Co-Planar Stereotaxic Atlas of the Human Brain—3-Dimensional Proportional System: An Approach to Cerebral Imaging, J. Talairach, P. Tournoux. Georg Thieme Verlag, New York (1988), 122 pp., 130 figs. DM 268 , 1990 .

[3]  M. Alexander,et al.  Broca's area aphasias , 1990, Neurology.

[4]  Richard S. J. Frackowiak,et al.  The anatomy of phonological and semantic processing in normal subjects. , 1992, Brain : a journal of neurology.

[5]  Colin Blakemore,et al.  Patterns of Local Connectivity in the Neocortex , 1993, Neural Computation.

[6]  Alan C. Evans,et al.  Neural mechanisms underlying melodic perception and memory for pitch , 1994, The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience.

[7]  Karl J. Friston,et al.  Spatial registration and normalization of images , 1995 .

[8]  M. E. Raichle,et al.  PET Studies of Auditory and Phonological Processing: Effects of Stimulus Characteristics and Task Demands , 1995, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[9]  Karl J. Friston,et al.  Movement‐Related effects in fMRI time‐series , 1996, Magnetic resonance in medicine.

[10]  K. Heilman,et al.  Understanding emotional prosody activates right hemisphere regions. , 1996, Archives of neurology.

[11]  Alan C. Evans,et al.  PET studies of phonetic processing of speech: review, replication, and reanalysis. , 1996, Cerebral cortex.

[12]  Richard S. J. Frackowiak,et al.  Noun and verb retrieval by normal subjects. Studies with PET. , 1996, Brain : a journal of neurology.

[13]  Dani Byrd,et al.  Auditory Selective Attention: An fMRI Investigation , 1996, NeuroImage.

[14]  Karl J. Friston,et al.  Detecting Activations in PET and fMRI: Levels of Inference and Power , 1996, NeuroImage.

[15]  Alan C. Evans,et al.  Left‐hemisphere specialization for the processing of acoustic transients , 1997, Neuroreport.

[16]  E. Ross,et al.  Lateralization of Affective Prosody in Brain and the Callosal Integration of Hemispheric Language Functions , 1997, Brain and Language.

[17]  Karl J. Friston,et al.  Human Brain Function , 1997 .

[18]  Stephen M. Rao,et al.  Human Brain Language Areas Identified by Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging , 1997, The Journal of Neuroscience.

[19]  J. Fiez.  Phonology, Semantics, and the Role of the Left Inferior Prefrontal Cortex , 2022 .

[20]  M. Corbetta,et al.  Common Blood Flow Changes across Visual Tasks: II. Decreases in Cerebral Cortex , 1997, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[21]  Alan C. Evans,et al.  Functional anatomy of musical processing in listeners with absolute pitch and relative pitch. , 1998, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[22]  S. Posse,et al.  Intensity coding of auditory stimuli: an fMRI study , 1998, Neuropsychologia.

[23]  R. Passingham,et al.  The Preparation, Execution and Suppression of Copied Movements in the Human Brain , 1996 .

[24]  K Ugurbil,et al.  Human primary visual cortex and lateral geniculate nucleus activation during visual imagery , 1998, Neuroreport.

[25]  Y. Samson,et al.  Lateralization of Speech and Auditory Temporal Processing , 1998, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[26]  R. Benedict,et al.  Functional neuroimaging of attention in the auditory modality , 1998, Neuroreport.

[27]  J. Desmond,et al.  Functional Specialization for Semantic and Phonological Processing in the Left Inferior Prefrontal Cortex , 1999, NeuroImage.

[28]  J. A. Frost,et al.  Conceptual Processing during the Conscious Resting State: A Functional MRI Study , 1999, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[29]  Alan C. Evans,et al.  Auditory Attention to Space and Frequency Activates Similar Cerebral Systems , 1999, NeuroImage.

[30]  F. Chollet,et al.  Differential fMRI Responses in the Left Posterior Superior Temporal Gyrus and Left Supramarginal Gyrus to Habituation and Change Detection in Syllables and Tones , 1999, NeuroImage.

[31]  R. Goebel,et al.  The functional neuroanatomy of target detection: an fMRI study of visual and auditory oddball tasks. , 1999, Cerebral cortex.

[32]  R. Cabeza,et al.  Imaging Cognition II: An Empirical Review of 275 PET and fMRI Studies , 2000, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[33]  Y. Grodzinsky.  The neurology of syntax: Language use without Broca's area , 2000, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[34]  D. Lancker,et al.  A Crosslinguistic PET Study of Tone Perception , 2000, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[35]  G. Waters,et al.  Activation of Broca's area by syntactic processing under conditions of concurrent articulation , 2000, Human brain mapping.