Optical neuroimaging of spoken language

ABSTRACT

In this review, I introduce the historical context and methods of optical neuroimaging, leading to the modern use of functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) and high-density diffuse optical tomography (HD-DOT) to study human brain function. In its most frequent application, optical neuroimaging measures a haemodynamically-mediated signal indirectly related to neural processing, similar to that captured by fMRI. Compared to other approaches to measuring human brain function, optical imaging has many advantages: it is noninvasive, frequently portable, acoustically silent, robust to motion and muscle movement, and appropriate in many situations in which fMRI is not possible (for example, due to implanted medical devices). Challenges include producing a full-brain field of view, homogenous spatial resolution, and accurate source localisation. Experimentally, optical neuroimaging has been used to study phoneme, word, and sentence processing in a variety of paradigms. With continuing technical and methodological improvements, the future of optical neuroimaging is increasingly bright.

KEYWORDS:

• Speech
• language
• fNIRS
• HD-DOT

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Adam Eggebrecht for extremely helpful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Dana Foundation and by grants R01DC14280 and R01AG038490 from the US National Institutes of Health.