Frequency-specific directed interactions between whole-brain regions during sentence processing using multimodal stimulus

Changfu Pei; Xunan Huang; Yuan Qiu; Yueheng Peng; Shan Gao; Bharat Biswal; Dezhong Yao; Qiang Liu; Fali Li; Peng Xu

doi:10.1016/j.neulet.2023.137409

Frequency-specific directed interactions between whole-brain regions during sentence processing using multimodal stimulus

Neurosci Lett. 2023 Aug 24:812:137409. doi: 10.1016/j.neulet.2023.137409. Epub 2023 Jul 23.

Authors

Changfu Pei¹, Xunan Huang², Yuan Qiu¹, Yueheng Peng¹, Shan Gao², Bharat Biswal³, Dezhong Yao¹, Qiang Liu⁴, Fali Li⁵, Peng Xu⁶

Affiliations

¹ The Clinical Hospital of Chengdu Brain Science Institute, MOE Key Lab for NeuroInformation, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, China; School of Life Science and Technology, Center for Information in BioMedicine, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, China.
² The Clinical Hospital of Chengdu Brain Science Institute, MOE Key Lab for NeuroInformation, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, China; School of Life Science and Technology, Center for Information in BioMedicine, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, China; School of Foreign Languages, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Sichuan, Chengdu 611731, China.
³ The Clinical Hospital of Chengdu Brain Science Institute, MOE Key Lab for NeuroInformation, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, China; School of Life Science and Technology, Center for Information in BioMedicine, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, China; Department of Biomedical Engineering, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ 07102, USA.
⁴ Institute of Brain and Psychological Sciences, Sichuan Normal University, Sichuan, Chengdu 610066, China. Electronic address: lq780614@163.com.
⁵ The Clinical Hospital of Chengdu Brain Science Institute, MOE Key Lab for NeuroInformation, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, China; School of Life Science and Technology, Center for Information in BioMedicine, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, China. Electronic address: fali.li@uestc.edu.cn.
⁶ The Clinical Hospital of Chengdu Brain Science Institute, MOE Key Lab for NeuroInformation, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, China; School of Life Science and Technology, Center for Information in BioMedicine, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, China. Electronic address: xupeng@uestc.edu.cn.

PMID: 37487970
DOI: 10.1016/j.neulet.2023.137409

Abstract

Neural oscillations subserve a broad range of speech processing and language comprehension functions. Using an electroencephalogram (EEG), we investigated the frequency-specific directed interactions between whole-brain regions while the participants processed Chinese sentences using different modality stimuli (i.e., auditory, visual, and audio-visual). The results indicate that low-frequency responses correspond to the process of information flow aggregation in primary sensory cortices in different modalities. Information flow dominated by high-frequency responses exhibited characteristics of bottom-up flow from left posterior temporal to left frontal regions. The network pattern of top-down information flowing out of the left frontal lobe was presented by the joint dominance of low- and high-frequency rhythms. Overall, our results suggest that the brain may be modality-independent when processing higher-order language information.

Keywords: Audio-visual integration; Brain network; EEG; Granger causality; Neural oscillations.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Brain / physiology
Brain Mapping / methods
Comprehension* / physiology
Frontal Lobe / physiology
Humans
Language
Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Speech Perception* / physiology