Performance in picture naming and word comprehension: Evidence for common neuronal substrates from intraoperative language mapping

Correlations of naming ability and performance in the Token Test are known from aphasia; however, the mechanisms underlying these correlations are unc lear. Naming tasks are commonly used in intraoperative mapping for identifc ation of cortical areas involved in language processing. In the present stu dy, we measured performance in an elementary Token Test task, i.e., single word comprehension, during electrical stimulation of cortical sites at whic h this stimulation previously had disturbed the naming process. It was foun d that at about half of the sites at which naming could be disturbed electr ical stimulation also led to disturbances in Token Test performance, indica ting that there are common neural structures critical for performance in bo th tasks. These findings are discussed in terms of a multilayered semantic network in which the level of the simultaneous binding of features into con cepts and the level of units that are organized with respect to semantic re lations may be disturbed separately. (C) 2001 Academic Press.