CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Introduction:Metaphors are not exclusive patrimony of poets and writers, but they are omnipresent in everyday language as idiomatic expressions (IE). Most are very typical to the country or region they are from, since they are closely linked to the culture, the history and the popular beliefs. For a language as widely spoken as Spanish, the number of IE is huge. Neural correlates for literal and non-literal language are different, as has been previously reported in many languages but Spanish. Aim: to investigate the functional anatomy of Spanish IE in normal subjects. Methods:20 normal subjects, right-handed, (10 women), mean age 32,6 y-o, were submitted to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during a task of reading literal or IE and choosing between 4 possible meanings. The stimuli were presented every ?..seconds in an event relateddesign, including an active baseline and a fixation task. 213 whole brain volumes (5 dummies) were acquired, with 2 secs RT in a 3T Siemens Trio scanner. A randomized effect analysis was made using SPM12, computing a BOLD contrast image for each subject and comparing IE vs figurative language and vs baseline by t tests. We included a group analysis comparing female and male processing. Results: All the participants had a performance significantly higher than the chance level. The results reported were obtained with a Punc4. Control subjects activated extensive clusters in in the left inferior frontal gyrus with extension into the middle frontal gyrus, bilateral middle/superior temporal gyrus, supramarginal gyrus, left insula, pars triangularis bilaterally. Brain activation in males was more lateralized leftwards, while women activated similar areas in both hemispheres.Discusion: Spanish IE processing requires simultaneous activation of several areas in both hemispheres, as other forms of non-literal language. These findings agree with previous reports about the functional anatomy of pragmatic language, even those with a different linguistic root. Besides cultural, historical, social and environmental factors, there are biological differences in IEprocessing between both sexes. A better understanding of the functional anatomy of language networks might have implications for theinterpretation of non-literal language deficits in clinical populations, such as autism, schizophrenia, stroke and basal ganglia disease.