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

• Published in: Neuroscience letters 2023-08, Vol.812, p.137409-137409, Article 137409
• Main Authors: Pei, Changfu, Huang, Xunan, Qiu, Yuan, Peng, Yueheng, Gao, Shan, Biswal, Bharat, Yao, Dezhong, Liu, Qiang, Li, Fali, Xu, Peng
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Audio-visual integration; Brain network; EEG; Granger causality; Neural oscillations
• ISSN: 0304-3940; 1872-7972
• DOI: 10.1016/j.neulet.2023.137409

•The brain is modality-independent in processing higher-order linguistic information.•Information flow aggregation in low-frequency-responsive primary sensory cortex.•The information flow with high frequency response is characterized by bottom-up.•The information flow dominated by low and high frequency presents a top-down feature. 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.