Is There a Role of Inferior Frontal Cortex in Motor Timing? A Study of Paced Finger Tapping in Patients with Non-Fluent Aphasia

The aim of the present study was to investigate the deficits in timing reproduction in individuals with non-fluent aphasia after a left hemisphere lesion including the inferior frontal gyrus, in which Broca’s region is traditionally localised. Eighteen stroke patients with non-fluent aphasia and twenty-two healthy controls were recruited. We used a finger-tapping Test, which consisted of the synchronisation and the continuation phase with three fixed intervals (450 ms, 650 ms and 850 ms). Participants firstly had to tap simultaneously with the device’s auditory stimuli (clips) (synchronisation phase) and then continue their tapping in the same pace when the stimuli were absent (continuation phase). Patients with aphasia demonstrated less accuracy and greater variability during reproduction in both phases, compared to healthy participants. More specifically, in the continuation phase, individuals with aphasia reproduced longer intervals than the targets, whereas healthy participants displayed accelerated responses. Moreover, patients’ timing variability was greater in the absence of the auditory stimuli. This could possibly be attributed to deficient mental representation of intervals and not experiencing motor difficulties (due to left hemisphere stroke), as the two groups did not differ in tapping reproduction with either hand. Given that previous findings suggest a potential link between the IFG, timing and working memory, we argue that patients’ extra-linguistic cognitive impairments should be accounted for, as possible contributing factors to timing disturbances.