Shared and modality-specific brain regions that mediate auditory and visual word comprehension
Abstract
Visual speech carried by lip movements is an integral part of communication. Yet, it remains unclear in how far visual and acoustic speech comprehension are mediated by the same brain regions. Using multivariate classification of full-brain MEG data, we first probed where the brain represents acoustically and visually conveyed word identities. We then tested where these sensory-driven representations are predictive of participants' trial-wise comprehension. The comprehension-relevant representations of auditory and visual speech converged only in anterior angular and inferior frontal regions and were spatially dissociated from those representations that best reflected the sensory-driven word identity. These results provide a neural explanation for the behavioural dissociation of acoustic and visual speech comprehension and suggest that cerebral representations encoding word identities may be more modality-specific than often upheld.
Data availability
All relevant data and stimuli lists have been deposited to Dryad, under the DOI:10.5061/dryad.zkh18937w.
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Data from: Shared and modality-specific brain regions that mediate auditory and visual word comprehensionDryad Digital Repository, doi:10.5061/dryad.zkh18937w.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BB/L027534/1)
- Joachim Gross
- Christoph Kayser
H2020 European Research Council (ERC-2014-CoG; grant No 646657)
- Christoph Kayser
Wellcome (Joint Senior Investigator Grant,No 098433)
- Joachim Gross
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (GR 2024/5-1)
- Joachim Gross
IZKF (Gro3/001/19)
- Joachim Gross
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Human subjects: All participants provided written informed consent prior to testing and received monetary compensation of £10/h. The experiment was approved by the ethics committee of the College of Science and Engineering, University of Glasgow (approval number 300140078), and conducted in compliance with the Declaration of Helsinki.
Copyright
© 2020, Keitel et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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