Two white matter pathways for language

Introduction: Present attempts to explain language processing in the brain still rely on a model developed by Broca, Wernicke and Lichtheim more than a century ago. While the model's assertions about cortical representations of language have undergone numerous modifications, its view on the underlying white matter circuitry has remained remarkably stable. The connection between temporal and frontal language areas is assigned to a sole fibre tract, the arcuate fascicle (AF). Employing a diffusion tensor (DT)-based fibre tracking algorithm, we aimed to identify alternative temporo-frontal pathways between function…