Structural plasticity of the ventral stream and aphasia recovery

Abstract

Re-strengthening of the residual language network is likely crucial for speech recovery in post-stroke aphasia. Eight participants with chronic aphasia received intensive speech therapy for three weeks, with standardized naming tests and brain MRIs before and after therapy. Kurtosis-based diffusion tensor tractography was used to measure mean kurtosis (MK) along a segment of the inferior longitudinal fasciculus (ILF). Therapy related reduction in the number of semantic but not phonemic errors was associated with strengthening (renormalization) of ILF MK (r=-0.90, P<0.05 corrected), suggesting that speech recovery is related to structural plasticity of linguistic specific components of the residual language network. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

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