The ability to acquire a new language is a unique and essential instinct of human brain. Chomsky proposed the hypothesis that all human languages shared a common design, called universal grammer, which supported the ability of learning a new language for both children and adults. However, the linguistic diversity has appeared in almost every aspect, including phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. In order to achieve a better understanding of the linguistic universals and diversity, it is crucial to uncover the biological constraints underlying human language. In 1861, Paul Broca presented a patient who suffered from severe brain damage in the left prefrontal cortex and had difficulties in spoken language, which is called Broca’s aphasia today. This study has identified the crucial role of Broca’s region in language processing. In the last twenty years, the fast development of brain imaging techniques has provided great opportunities to study the neural basis of human language in vivo. Resting-state fMRI (rs-fMRI), which measures spontaneous fluctuations in BOLD signals, provides important insights into the core organization of the brain and is therefore a useful tool to study the intrinsic organization of lanuage areas. In this study, we have proposed a robust brain parcellation method based on rs-fMRI data and explored the cross-culture consistency in the intrinsic functional organization of Broca’s region. The main achievements of our study are as follows: 1. We proposed a robust parcellation method for rs-fMRI-based brain parcellation, which constructs a sparse similarity graph based on the sparse representation coefficients of each seed voxel and then uses spectral clustering to identify distinct modules. The robustness of our method was tested on both simulated and real rs-fMRI datasets. In particular, on simulated rs-fMRI data, sparse representation achieved good performance across different noise levels, including high accuracy of parcellation and high robustness to noise. On real rs-fMRI data, stable parcellation of the medial frontal cortex (MFC) and parietal operculum (OP) were achieved on three different datasets, with high reproducibility within each dataset and high consistency across these results. Besides, the parcellation of MFC was little influenced by the degrees of spatial smoothing. Furthermore, the consistent parcellation of OP was also well corresponding to cytoarchitectonic subdivisions and known somatotopic organ...
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