The Relationship between Lexical Selection Deficits and the Metrics of the Frontal Lobe White-Matter Tracts after Stroke

Damage to language-related areas of the human brain following stroke can probably lead to various speech difficulties. Lexical selection deficits are increasingly recognized as a linguistic and clinical issue due to the involvement of lexical selection in each speech act. Previous functional neuroimaging studies have frequently discussed the crucial role of the certain cortical areas involved in lexical selection during language production (Ardila, 2010). Nevertheless, there is a lack of studies that reveal possible connection of the aforementioned processes and frontal lobe white-matter tracts. The present study aims to identify and analyze the relationship between the measure of lexical selection and the characteristics of the integrity of frontal aslant tract, the uncinate fasciculus tract, and the interhemispheric connections between the cortical projections of frontal aslant tract. Twenty patients who have suffered a stroke participated in the present study. The measures will be obtained from the picture-word interference and sentence completion tasks. Flanker's control non-language test was also performed. The results of partial correlations did not confirm the existence of a relationship between measures of lexical selection and metrics of tract volumes. There are several reasons why we got negative results: 1) Insufficient sample size; 2) Low variability of behavioral measures; 3) High variability in time elapsed after stroke.