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Brain Advance Access published online on June 23, 2004

Brain, doi:10.1093/brain/awh199
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Received September 4, 2003
Revised March 24, 2004
Accepted March 29, 2004

Article

Cortical activation and synchronization during sentence comprehension in high-functioning autism: evidence of underconnectivity

Marcel Adam Just 1*, Vladimir L. Cherkassky 1, Timothy A. Keller 1, Nancy J. Minshew 2

1 Department of Psychology, Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA
2 University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: just{at}cmu.edu.


   Abstract

Summary The brain activation of a group of high-functioning autistic participants was measured using functional MRI during sentence comprehension and the results compared with those of a Verbal IQ-matched control group. The groups differed in the distribution of activation in two of the key language areas. The autism group produced reliably more activation than the control group in Wernicke's (left latero-superior temporal) area and reliably less activation than the control group in Broca's (left inferior frontal gyrus) area. Furthermore, the functional connectivity, i.e. the degree of synchronization or correlation of the time series of the activation, between the various participating cortical areas was consistently lower for the autistic than the control participants. These findings suggest that the neural basis of disordered language in autism entails a lower degree of information integration and synchronization across the large-scale cortical network for language processing. The article presents a theoretical account of the findings, related to neurobiological foundations of underconnectivity in autism.

Keywords: autism; sentence comprehension; functional MRI.
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