Abstract
Ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC) has long been linked to language production, but the precise mechanisms are still being elucidated. Using neuropsychological case studies, we explored possible sub-specialization within this region for different linguistic and executive functions. Frontal patients with different lesion profiles completed two sequencing tasks, which were hypothesized to engage partially overlapping components. The multi-word priming task tested the sequencing of co-activated representations and the overriding of primed word orders. The sequence reproduction task tested the sequencing of co-activated representations, but did not employ a priming manipulation. We compared patients' performance on the two tasks to that of healthy, age-matched controls. Results are partially consistent with an anterior-posterior gradient of cognitive control within lateral prefrontal cortex (Koechlin & Summerfield, 2007). However, we also found a stimulus-specific pattern, which suggests that sub-specialization might be contingent on type of representation as well as type of control signal. Isolating such components functionally and anatomically might lead to a better understanding of language production deficits in aphasia.