RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Cerebral laterality for writing in right- and left-handers: A functional transcranial Doppler ultrasound study
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2020.07.14.203588
DO 10.1101/2020.07.14.203588
A1 Marietta Papadatou-Pastou
A1 Panagiotis Sampanis
A1 Ioannis Koumzis
A1 Sofia Stefanopoulou
A1 Dionysia Sousani
A1 Athina Tsigkou
A1 Nicholas A. Badcock
YR 2021
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/07/06/2020.07.14.203588.abstract
AB The cerebral lateralization of written language has received very limited research attention in comparison to the wealth of studies on the cerebral lateralization of oral language. The purpose of the present study was to further our understanding of written language lateralization, by elucidating on the relative contribution of language and motor functions. We compared written word generation with a task that has equivalent visuomotor demands, but does not include language (i.e., the repeated drawing of symbols). We assessed cerebral laterality using functional transcranial Doppler ultrasound (fTCD), a non-invasive, perfusion-sensitive neuroimaging technique in 23 left- and 31 right-handed participants (based on hand-writing preference, but results were similar for divisions based on the Edinburgh Handedness Inventory, Annett’s Pegboard, and the Quantification of Hand Preference Test reaching task). Findings suggest that, in right-handers, the linguistic aspect of written word generation recruited left-hemispheric areas during writing, similarly to oral language production. In left-handers, we failed to observe the same effect. Moreover, we observed that right-hemispheric activation was higher for symbol copying (vs. written word generation) in right-handers only. The greater variability in cerebral laterality patterns within left-handers or the attentional demands of symbol copying could explain the different findings between right- and left-handers. Future work could investigate such demands using both simple and complex stimuli in the copying condition.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.