Brain activation for reading and listening comprehension: An fMRI study of modality effects and individual differences in language comprehension.

Abstract

The study compared the brain activation patterns associated with the comprehension of written and spoken Portuguese sentences. An fMRI study measured brain activity while participants read and listened to sentences about general world knowledge. Participants had to decide if the sentences were true or false. To mirror the transient nature of spoken sentences, visual input was presented in rapid serial visual presentation format. The results showed a common core of amodal left inferior frontal and middle temporal gyri activation, as well as modality specific brain activation associated with listening and reading comprehension. Reading comprehension was associated with more left-lateralized activation and with left inferior occipital cortex (including fusiform gyrus) activation. Listening comprehension was associated with extensive bilateral temporal cortex activation and more overall activation of the whole cortex. Results also showed individual differences in brain activation for reading comprehension. Readers with lower working memory capacity showed more activation of right-hemisphere areas (spillover of activation) and more activation in the prefrontal cortex, potentially associated with more demand placed on executive control processes. Readers with higher working memory capacity showed more activation in a frontal-posterior network of areas (left angular and precentral gyri, and right inferior frontal gyrus). The activation of this network may be associated with phonological rehearsal of linguistic information when reading text presented in rapid serial visual format. The study demonstrates the modality fingerprints for language comprehension and indicates how lowand high working memory capacity readers deal with reading text presented in serial format.

Cross-modal connectivity of the secondary auditory cortex with higher visual area in the congenitally deaf—A case study

“…The red dotted circle is the right fusiform gyrus. auditory cortex in the present experiment indicates that the secondary auditory cortex in the deaf received more language information than the cortex in normal-hearing subjects, which is reasonable when we consider that the ventral visual region processes visual words [15,16].…”

Integration of Partial Information Within and Across Modalities: Contributions to Spoken and Written Sentence Recognition

“…Neuroimaging studies aimed at investigating the neural correlates of reading and listening comprehension also support this model of modality-aspecific language processing with two separate modality-specific mechanisms for processing low-level perceptual features of speech and text signals (Booth et al, 2002a(Booth et al, , 2002b(Booth et al, , 2003Buchweitz, Mason, Tomitch, & Just, 2009;Jobard, Vigneau, Mazoyer, & Tzourio-Mazoyer, 2007;Michael et al, 2001). These studies have identified the critical neural structures associated with modality-aspecific language processing, predominately the left inferior frontal gyrus (Buchweitz et al, 2009).…”

“…These studies have identified the critical neural structures associated with modality-aspecific language processing, predominately the left inferior frontal gyrus (Buchweitz et al, 2009). In addition, modality-specific neural structures have been identified: the auditory cortex critical for processing speech and decoding acoustic features and the visual cortex and fusiform gyrus for processing written visual information (Jobard et al, 2007;Mesulam, 1998).…”

Neural Correlates of Coherence-Break Detection During Reading of Narratives

“…In this region, participants' working-memory capacity was negatively correlated with activation in response to coherence breaks. In the context of sentence comprehension, a few studies have reported increased brain activation for participants with lower relative to higher working-memory capacity (e.g., Buchweitz, Mason, Tomitch, & Just, 2009;Prat, Keller, & Just, 2007). For example, Newman, Malaia, Seo, and Cheng (2013) found that increased brain activation in the precuneus and inferior frontal gyrus during sentence processing was negatively correlated with working-memory capacity.…”