Specific regions of the cerebellum are activated when neurologically intact adults speak, and cerebellar damage can impair speech production early after stroke, but how the brain supports accurate speech production years after cerebellar damage remains unknown. We investigated this in patients with cerebellar lesions affecting regions that are normally recruited during speech production. Functional MRI activation in these patients, measured during various single word production tasks, was compared to that of neurologically intact controls, and patient controls with lesions that spared the cerebellar speech production regions. Our analyses revealed that, during a range of speech production tasks, patients with damage to cerebellar speech production regions had greater activation in the right dorsal premotor cortex (r-PMd) and right supplementary motor area (r-SMA) compared to neurologically intact controls.

The loci of increased activation in cerebral motor speech areas motivate future studies to delineate the functional contributions of different parts of the speech production network, and test whether non-invasive stimulation to r-PMd and r-SMA facilitates speech recovery after cerebellar stroke.

当神经功能完好的成年人说话时，小脑的特定区域会被激活，小脑损伤会在中风后早期损害言语产生，但在小脑损伤数年后大脑如何支持准确的言语产生仍然未知。我们在患有小脑病变的患者中调查了这一点，这些病变影响了通常在讲话过程中被招募的区域。这些患者的功能性 MRI 激活（在各种单个单词产生任务期间测量）与神经功能完整的对照组和患者对照组的功能进行了比较，这些患者的损伤不影响小脑语音产生区域。我们的分析表明，在一系列语音制作任务中，

大脑运动语言区域激活增加的位点促使未来的研究描述语言产生网络不同部分的功能贡献，并测试对 r-PMd 和 r-SMA 的非侵入性刺激是否有助于小脑卒中后的语言恢复。