Narrative speech production: An fMRI study using continuous arterial spin labeling

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with continuous arterial spin labeling (CASL) was employed to monitor brain activation during narrative production of a semi-structured speech sample in healthy young adults. Subjects were asked to describe a wordless children's picture story. Significant activations were found in bilateral prefrontal and left temporal-parietal regions during narrative production relative to description of a single picture and relative to viewing the wordless picture story while producing a nonsense word. We conclude that inferior frontal cortex serves as a top-down organizational resource for narrative production and demonstrate the feasibility of collecting extended speech samples using CASL perfusion fMRI.