The Links Between Executive and Linguistic Processes and Their Lesional Determinants From a Verbal Fluency Task

Verbal fluency test require to produce as much words as possible in one or two minutes. This test is highly sensitive to main brain diseases and are therefore widely used in clinical routine for diagnostic purpose. The verbal fluency task requires several cognitive processes including executive and linguistic processes for which it is difficult to extract the origin of the deficit. For this reason, fluency tests are variably interpreted in terms of executive or language. The implementation of an experimental protocol exploring each of these processes separately and studying the links between the verbal fluency task and each of these processes should allow a better understanding of the origin of the verbal fluency deficit after brain injury and improve the identification of key brain structures. Indeed, the lesion determinants of this task remain to be clarified despite remarkable advances due to the evolution of imaging techniques (voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping (VLSM); voxel-based morphometry (VBM)). Furthermore, while the direct assessment of linguistic process, semantic memory, and processing speed is well defined, the examination of the executive component (i.e., strategic search process) remains unsettled and will be undertaken in this study. This work will take advantage of data from previous multicenter work, validated methodologies for both analysis and interpretation of cognitive performance as well as anatomic-clinical correlations at the voxel level and will be performed in cognitive neurodegenerative and cerebrovascular disease.