Brain Areas Critical for Picture Naming: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Lesion-Symptom Mapping Studies

Abstract

Lesion-symptom mapping (LSM) studies have revealed brain areas critical for naming, typically finding significant associations between damage to left temporal, inferior parietal, and inferior fontal regions and impoverished naming performance. However, specific subregions found in the available literature vary. Hence, the aim of this study was to perform a systematic review and meta-analysis of published lesion-based findings, obtained from studies with unique cohorts investigating brain areas critical for accuracy in naming in stroke patients at least 1 month post-onset. An anatomic likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analysis of these LSM studies was performed. Ten papers entered the ALE meta-analysis, with similar lesion coverage over left temporal and left inferior frontal areas. This small number is a major limitation of the present study. Clusters were found in left anterior temporal lobe, posterior temporal lobe extending into inferior parietal areas, in line with the arcuate fasciculus, and in pre- and postcentral gyri and middle frontal gyrus. No clusters were found in left inferior frontal gyrus. These results were further substantiated by examining five naming studies that investigated performance beyond global accuracy, corroborating the ALE meta-analysis results. The present review and meta-analysis highlight the involvement of left temporal and inferior parietal cortices in naming, and of mid to posterior portions of the temporal lobe in particular in conceptual-lexical retrieval for speaking.

Keywords: confrontation naming; lexical semantics; object naming; oral naming; word finding.

Figure 1.

PRISMA flow diagram of the literature selection process.

Figure 2.

Results of the anatomic likelihood estimate (ALE) analysis. (Top) Location of the four clusters (cluster 1 in pink, cluster 2 in light blue, cluster 3 in green, cluster 4 in red), with significant association between global accuracy in naming task performance and brain lesions. Location of all sagittal slices is indicated in the upper right corner. (Bottom) ALE maps of the four clusters, corrected for cluster-level familywise error at an alpha level of 0.05 (following voxel-level threshold of 0.01). The color bar indicates the ALE value range. (Gray inset) Cluster 2 (in blue), arcuate fasciculus (in yellow), and their overlap (in green). The arcuate fasciculus mask was obtained from the Natbrain atlas (Catani & Thiebaut de Schotten, 2008).