Comparison of hemispheric lateralization using four language tasks

Introduction The determination of hemispheric language dominance in individuals is important in many clinical contexts, particularly for the pre-operative assessment of patients undergoing neoplasm resection or temporal lobectomy for medically intractable epilepsy. The Wada test has been the clinical standard for this determination for many years. Recently, functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) has been used to assess hemispheric language dominance, and shows good correspondence to Wada test results in individual patients. However, it is unclear which FMRI behavioral paradigms best demonstrate hemispheric language dominance. The purpose of this study was to compare in healthy subjects the hemispheric asymmetry of activation maps from four different language paradigms.