A neurocognitive account of frontal lobe involvement in orthographic lexical retrieval: An fMRI study

Abstract

The present study aimed to examine the relationship between activation induced by an orthographic lexical retrieval (OLR) task and performance across time on the standard clinical version of OLR, the Controlled Oral Word Association Test (COWAT). The number of significantly activated pixels in a frontal lobe region of interest (encompassing middle and inferior frontal gyri) were measured for the left and right cerebral hemispheres in 20 volunteers. A relationship between the pixel count and the total number of words retrieved during the COWAT was found for the left but not the right hemisphere. Further examination of the left-sided relationship showed that the number of pixels in the left mi..