Abstract
In neurolinguistics, the controversy about whether word semantics are stored in an amodal language-specific center or distributed in modality-specific sensory-motor systems comes from two inconsistent evidences: (i) Semantic Dementia (SD) patients who got a focal brain damage in the anterior temporal lobe (ATL) exhibit a general loss of conceptual knowledge across all word categories; (ii) fMRI examinations of semantic memory found no clues in the ATL but a broad activation in the sensory and motor regions (SMR) that represent the visual and motor features of words. To settle this dispute, the current study aims to examine the whole-range brain dynamics during word processing using (i) 2-D ERP-image analysis, (ii) independent component clustering and (iii) EEG source reconstruction methods. It was found that both ATL and SMR participated in the spoken word processing by means of recurrent interaction, and the visual and motor cortex exhibited specific activation patterns for noun and verb respectively. These results suggest a hierarchical organization of word semantics that combines amodal ATL and modal SMR to form a complete concept.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Kiefer, M., Pulvermüller, F.: Conceptual representations in mind and brain: theoretical developments, current evidence and future directions. Cortex 48, 805 (2012)
Patterson, K., Nestor, P.J., Rogers, T.T.: Where do you know what you know? The representation of semantic knowledge in the human brain. Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 8, 976–987 (2007)
Hoffman, P., Ralph, M.A.L.: Reverse concreteness effects are not a typical feature of semantic dementia: evidence for the hub-and-spoke model of conceptual representation. Cereb. Cortex 21, 2103 (2011)
Bozeat, S., Lambon Ralph, M.A., Patterson, K., Garrard, P., Hodges, J.R.: Non-verbal semantic impairment in semantic dementia. Neuropsychologia 38, 1207–1215 (2000)
Pobric, G., Jefferies, E., Ralph, M.A.L.: Anterior temporal lobes mediate semantic representation: mimicking semantic dementia by using rTMS in normal participants. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U S A 104, 20137–20141 (2007)
Rogers, T.T., Hocking, J., Noppeney, U., Mechelli, A., Gornotempini, M.L., Patterson, K., et al.: Anterior temporal cortex and semantic memory: reconciling findings from neuropsychology and functional imaging. Cogn. Affect. Behav. Neurosci. 6, 201 (2006)
Review, P.: Structure and deterioration of semantic memory: a neuropsychological and computational investigation. Psychol. Rev. 111, 205–235 (2004)
Martin, A.: The representation of object concepts in the Brain. Annu. Rev. Psychol. 58, 25 (2007)
Moseley, R.L., Pulvermüller, F.: Nouns, verbs, objects, actions, and abstractions: local fMRI activity indexes semantics, not lexical categories. Brain Lang. 132, 28 (2014)
Zhao, B., Dang, J., Zhang, G.: EEG source reconstruction evidence for the noun-verb neural dissociation along semantic dimensions. Neuroscience 359, 183–195 (2017)
Paul, H., Evans, G.A.L., Lambon, R.M.A.: The anterior temporal lobes are critically involved in acquiring new conceptual knowledge: evidence for impaired feature integration in semantic dementia☆. Cortex 50, 19 (2014)
Makeig, S., Westerfield, M., Enghoff, S., Townsend, J., Courchesne, E., Sejnowski, T.J.: Dynamic brain sources of visual evoked responses. Science 295, 690–694 (2002)
Delorme, A., Makeig, S.: EEGLAB: an open source toolbox for analysis of single-trial EEG dynamics including independent component analysis. J. Neurosci. Methods 134, 9 (2004)
Pascual-Marqui, R.D.: Standardized low-resolution brain electromagnetic tomography (sLORETA): technical details. Methods Find. Exp. Clin. Pharmacol. 24(Suppl D), 5–12 (2002)
Makeig, S., Jung, T.P., Bell, A.J., Ghahremani, D., Sejnowski, T.J.: Blind separation of auditory event-related brain responses into independent components. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 94, 10979–10984 (1997)
Zhao, B., Dang, J., Zhang, G.: Investigation of noun-verb dissociation based on EEG source reconstruction. In: Signal and Information Processing Association Summit and Conference, pp. 1–7 (2017)
Bell, A.J., Sejnowski, T.J.: An information-maximization approach to blind separation and blind deconvolution. Neural Comput. 7, 1129–1159 (1995)
Zhao, B., Dang, J., Zhang, G.: EEG evidence for a three-phase recurrent process during spoken word processing. Presented at the 10th ISCSLP, Tianjin, China (2016)
Jackson, R.L., Hoffman, P., Pobric, G., Ralph, M.A.L.: The semantic network at work and rest: differential connectivity of anterior temporal lobe subregions. J. Neurosci. Official J. Soc. Neurosci. 36, 1490 (2016)
Binney, R.J., Parker, G.J., Lambon Ralph, M.A.: Convergent connectivity and graded specialization in the rostral human temporal lobe as revealed by diffusion-weighted imaging probabilistic tractography. J. Cogn. Neurosci. 24, 1998–2014 (2012)
Lambon Ralph, M.A., Sage, K., Jones, R.W., Mayberry, E.J.: Coherent concepts are computed in the anterior temporal lobes. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 107, 2717–2722 (2010)
Huth, A.G., De, H.W.A., Griffiths, T.L., Theunissen, F.E., Gallant, J.L.: Natural speech reveals the semantic maps that tile human cerebral cortex. Nature 532, 453–458 (2016)
Acknowledgements
The research is supported partially by the National Basic Research Program of China (No. 2013CB329301), and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61233009 and 61503278). The study is supported partially by JSPS KAKENHI Grant (16K00297).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Zhao, B., Zhang, G., Dang, J. (2018). Interactions Between Modal and Amodal Semantic Areas in Spoken Word Comprehension. In: Fang, Q., Dang, J., Perrier, P., Wei, J., Wang, L., Yan, N. (eds) Studies on Speech Production. ISSP 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10733. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00126-1_18
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00126-1_18
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-00125-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-00126-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)