Tutoriel : introduction à la psycholinguistique et à la neurolinguistique

Presenter: Thomas R. Williamson and Lidya Wiernik (Brain, Language, and Behaviour Lab, Bristol Centre for Linguistics, University of the West of England & Southmead Hospital)

Title: Awake craniotomy with English and British Sign Language mapping in a patient with a left temporal glioblastoma

Link: https://univ-paris8.zoom.us/j/96592080294?pwd=JLODH1NwL7y8MVNANJabTjagzy8UtW.1

Abstract: Neurosurgery is often performed in awake patients for tumours in language-eloquent brain regions where direct electrical stimulation (DES) is used to map functional tissue cortically and subcortically. Almost always, this testing is conducted on hearing, spoken language users. To the best of our knowledge, there are only four reported cases of sign language mapping during awake craniotomy (Chen et al., 2020; Lau et al., 2023; Martino et al., 2017; Metellus et al., 2017), all in deaf patients, one of whom also communicated orally. Further, no standardised battery for intraoperative testing of any sign language exists worldwide. We report the first case of a hearing adult Child of Deaf Adults (CODA) who presented with a left anterior temporal lobe glioblastoma that extended into frontal and insular regions. The patient was a 53-year-old bimodal bilingual with British Sign Language (BSL) as his first language, which he used in his profession as an interpreter, and English as his second. English testing was conducted in English with the Comprehensive Aphasia Test (CAT) (Swinburn et al., 2005) and Dutch Linguistic Intraoperative Protocol (DuLIP) (Collée et al., 2023; De Witte et al., 2015) test batteries; BSL testing used adaptations of the DuLIP and BSL Cognitive Screening Test (BSL-CST) (Atkinson et al., 2015). Intraoperative stimulation revealed positive English sites in the motor cortex and superior temporal sulcus, and for BSL in these sites plus pars opercularis of the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG). Early post-operative assessment revealed mild reductions in semantic and phonological fluency identified on English testing with no reduction in performance seen in any test of BSL, compared with pre-operative testing. Our results highlight the possible discordance of neurobiological models of language for signed and spoken languages, given the inhibition only of BSL upon stimulation of the left IFG (which albeit could be an L1 effect), and point to the utility of designing standardised perioperative sign language testing batteries.