Evaluating the roles of left middle frontal gyrus in word production using electrocorticography.

To assess the specific roles of left middle frontal gyrus (LMFG) in word production, electrocorticography signals were recorded from an epilepsy patient when he participated in language tasks. We found three sites of LMFG showed high-gamma perturbations with distinct patterns across tasks; and neural activities elicited in the same tasks shared similar patterns, while those elicited by stimuli leading to the same articulations did not. These findings confirmed that the LMFG takes active parts in word production, and suggested that it may serve as a temporal perceptual information storage space, supporting the hierarchical state feedback control model of word production.