• Carolina Méndez-Orellana, Leonardo Arraño-Carrasco, Bárbara Cortés-Rivera, Karina Sandoval-León, José Lorenzoni-Santos, Pablo Villanueva-Garín, Ricardo Rojas-Valdivia, Teobaldo Méndez-Ortega, Jaime Monsalve-Rosales, Paulo Flores-Kruuse, Pablo Carmona-Rammsy, David Rojas-Pinto, Álvaro Reyes-Ponce, and Francisco Mery-Muñoz.
• Facultad de Medicina, Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile.
• Rev Med Chil. 2021 May 1; 149 (5): 689-697.

BackgroundThe crossed cerebro-cerebellar (CCC) activation facilitates the diagnosis of cortical language lateralization, but needs to be explored with language tasks suitable for patients with different age ranges, educational attainment and eventual presence of language deficits.AimTo determine the effect of demographic variables in the performance of three language tasks in healthy volunteers and to determine the CCC activation of these tasks as a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) paradigm in brain tumor patients.Material And MethodsThe behavioral performance (correct responses and reaction time) of three language tasks (verbal fluency, semantic and phonological decision tasks) was first examined in 76 healthy volunteers balanced by age and educational level. Later, these tasks were implemented as fMRI paradigms to explore CCC language activation of 20 patients with potential diagnosis of brain tumors.ResultsThe performance of the verbal fluency task was affected by age. The CCC language activation was reproducible with the semantic and phonological tasks. The combination of the tasks determined typical and atypical language lateralization in 60% and 40% of our patients, respectively.ConclusionsThe verbal fluency task must be implemented with care as a clinical fMRI paradigm. Our results suggest that semantic and phonological tasks can be a good alternative for brain tumor patients with language deficits.

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