For both participants, the results showed strong initial activation in Broca and Wernicke areas during the language task, followed by weaker activation in the corresponding areas of the right hemisphere, suggesting a left lateralization of language. In Chaudhary et al. (2011)’s study, 15 healthy right-handed adults also performed an overt verbal fluency task. The results revealed

an increase in [HbO] and a decrease in [HbR] in the anterior frontal cortex with more activation Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical in the left than right anterior frontal cortex, whereas activation was bilateral in the prefrontal cortex. The verbal fluency task also demonstrated consistent results in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and magneto-encephalography (MEG) in determining language localization and lateralization (Yamamoto et al. 2006; Pelletier et al. 2011; Gallagher et al. 2008; Pirmoradi et al. 2010). With regard to reading, a recent review by Quaresima et al. (2012) reports on fNIRS

studies that used overt or covert Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical reading in adults. For example, Kahlaoui et al. (2007) presented 112 written words (concrete nouns) and 112 written Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical pseudowords to 10 adults aged between 25 and 35. While sellectchem undergoing fNIRS recordings, the participants were asked to read the Tofacitinib baldness stimuli silently and decide whether each stimulus was a word that belonged to the French language. fNIRS data showed increased blood oxygenation patterns in frontal and temporal regions bilaterally (increase of [HbO] and decrease of [HbR]) in the decision phase. Another study by Hofmann et al. (2008) examined cortical oxygenation changes in the superior frontal gyrus (SFG), the left inferior parietal gyrus (IPG),

and the Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) while German-speaking participants were performing a lexical decision task from visual input. The stimuli set consisted of 100 written words (50 low-frequency and 50 high-frequency) Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical and 100 written pseudowords. The results showed a significantly larger [HbO] increase and [HbR] decrease in the SFG and left IPG in word than in pseudoword reading. In the IFG, a significantly greater decrease of [HbR] without an increase of [HbO] was found when participants read low-frequency words, compared with high-frequency words. The author’s hypothesis is that the decrease of [HbR] is likely due to Brefeldin_A the contribution of the grapheme-to-phoneme conversion that is higher when reading low- versus high-frequency words. In addition to words and pseudowords, sentence and text stimuli were also used in fNIRS studies. For instance, Kennan et al. (2002) conducted NIRS recordings while six healthy adult participants were requested to make a grammatical judgment on written sentences. Half of the sentence stimuli were well-formed while the other half were either syntactically or semantically incongruous. The results revealed a left-hemisphere language dominance in prefrontal areas.