Journal Article

Brain correlates of speech perception in schizophrenia patients with and without auditory hallucinations

Soler-Vidal, Joan, García-León, María Ángeles, Salvador, Raymond, Pomarol-Clotet, Edith, Fuentes-Claramonte, Paola, Munuera, Josep, Salgado-Pineda, Pilar, Guerrero-Pedraza, Amalia, Sarró, Salvador, McKenna, Peter, Ramiro, Nuria, Hinzen, Wolfram, Torres, María Llanos, Arévalo, Antonio

2022

Overview

The experience of auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH, “hearing voices”) in schizophrenia has been found to be associated with reduced auditory cortex activation during perception of real auditory stimuli like tones and speech. We re-examined this finding using 46 patients with schizophrenia (23 with frequent AVH and 23 hallucination-free), who underwent fMRI scanning while they heard words, sentences and reversed speech. Twenty-five matched healthy controls were also examined. Perception of words, sentences and reversed speech all elicited activation of the bilateral superior temporal cortex, the inferior and lateral prefrontal cortex, the inferior parietal cortex and the supplementary motor area in the patients and the healthy controls. During the sentence and reversed speech conditions, the schizophrenia patients as a group showed reduced activation in the left primary auditory cortex (Heschl’s gyrus) relative to the healthy controls. No differences were found between the patients with and without hallucinations in any condition. This study therefore fails to support previous findings that experience of AVH attenuates speech-perception-related brain activations in the auditory cortex. At the same time, it suggests that schizophrenia patients, regardless of presence of AVH, show reduced activation in the primary auditory cortex during speech perception, a finding which could reflect an early information processing deficit in the disorder.

• Publisher: Public Library of Science,Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subject: Auditory Cortex - diagnostic imaging / Auditory Perception / Auditory stimuli / Biology and Life Sciences / Brain / Brain - diagnostic imaging / Brain mapping / Care and treatment / Cortex (auditory) / Cortex (motor) / Cortex (parietal) / Cortex (temporal) / Data processing / Functional magnetic resonance imaging / Hallucinations / Hallucinations - complications / Hallucinations - diagnostic imaging / Hallucinations and illusions / Hearing / Humans / Information processing / Magnetic Resonance Imaging / Medicine and Health Sciences / Mental disorders / Patient outcomes / Patients / Perception / Prefrontal cortex / Schizophrenia / Schizophrenia - complications / Schizophrenia - diagnostic imaging / Sentences / Social Sciences / Speech / Speech perception / Speech Perception - physiology / Supplementary motor area / Temporal Lobe / Words (language)