Following stroke, some people experience a language disorder that\u00a0hinders their ability to process speech sounds. How do their brains change from stroke?\u00a0Researchers led by\u00a0Laura Gwilliams,\u00a0faculty scholar at the Wu Tsai Neuroscience Institute and Stanford Data Science and\u00a0assistant\u00a0professor\u00a0at\u00a0the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences, and Maaike\u00a0Vandermosten, associate professor at the Department of Neurosciences at KU Leuven,\u00a0compared the brains of 39 patients following stroke and 24 healthy age-matched controls to unveil language processing brain mechanisms.\u00a0<\/p>\n
As reported in their\u00a0JNeurosci\u00a0paper,\u00a0the researchers recorded brain activity while volunteers listened to a story.\u00a0People with verbal speech processing issues\u00a0from stroke\u00a0were not slower to process speech\u00a0sounds but\u00a0had much weaker\u00a0processing\u00a0than healthy participants. According to the researchers, this suggests that\u00a0people with this language disorder\u00a0can hear\u00a0sounds\u00a0of all kinds\u00a0as well as healthy\u00a0people but\u00a0have issues integrating\u00a0speech\u00a0sounds\u00a0to\u00a0understand language.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Additionally,\u00a0when\u00a0there was uncertainty\u00a0about what\u00a0words were being said, healthy\u00a0people\u00a0processed\u00a0speech sound features\u00a0longer\u00a0compared to those who had experienced a stroke.\u00a0This\u00a0could mean\u00a0that, following stroke, people do not process speech sounds long enough to successfully\u00a0comprehend\u00a0words\u00a0that are difficult to detect.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This\u00a0work\u00a0points\u00a0to\u00a0brain activity patterns\u00a0that may be crucial for understanding verbal language, according to the authors.\u00a0First author Jill\u00a0Kries\u00a0expresses excitement\u00a0about continuing to explore how\u00a0this\u00a0simple approach-listening to a story-can be used to improve diagnostics for\u00a0conditions\u00a0characterized by language processing issues,\u00a0which currently\u00a0involve\u00a0hours of behavioral tasks.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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