The enigmatic linguistic cerebellum: clinical relevance and unanswered questions on nonmotor speech and language deficits in cerebellar disorders
Abstract
Clinical case descriptions and experimental evidence dating back to the early part of the 19th century from time to time documented a range of nonmotor cognitive and affective impairments following cerebellar pathology. However, a causal relationship between disruption of nonmotor cognitive and affective skills and cerebellar disease was dismissed for several decades and the classical view of the cerebellum as a mere coordinator of autonomic and somatic sensorimotor function prevailed for more than two centuries in behavioural neuroscience. The ignorance of early clinical evidence suggesting a much richer and complex role for the cerebellum than a pure sensorimotor one is remarkable given that in addition: 1) the cerebellum contains more neurons than the rest of the combined cerebral cortex and 2) no other structure has as many connections with other parts of the brain as the cerebellum. During the past decades, the long-standing view of the cerebellum as pure coordinator of sensorimotor function has been substantially modified. From the late 1970s onwards, major advances were made in elucidating the many functional neuroanatomical connections of the cerebellum with the supratentorial association cortices that subserve nonmotor...Continue Reading
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