Neural representation of phonological wordform in bilateral posterior temporal cortex

Abstract

While the neural bases of the earliest stages of speech categorization have been widely explored using neural decoding methods, there is still a lack of consensus on questions as basic as how wordforms are represented and in what way this word-level representation influences downstream processing in the brain. Isolating and localizing the neural representations of wordform is challenging because spoken words evoke activation of a variety of representations (e.g., segmental, semantic, articulatory) in addition to form-based representations. We addressed these challenges through a novel integrated neural decoding and effective connectivity design using region of interest (ROI)-based, source reconstructed magnetoencephalography/electroencephalography (MEG/EEG) data collected during a lexical decision task. To localize wordform representations, we trained classifiers on words and nonwords from different phonological neighborhoods and then tested the classifiers' ability to discriminate between untrained target words that overlapped phonologically with the trained items. Training with either word or nonword neighbors supported decoding in many brain regions during an early analysis window (100-400 ms) reflecting primarily incremental phonological processing. Training with word neighbors, but not nonword neighbors, supported decoding in a bilateral set of temporal lobe ROIs, in a later time window (400-600 ms) reflecting activation related to word recognition. These ROIs included bilateral posterior temporal regions implicated in wordform representation. Effective connectivity analyses among regions within this subset indicated that word-evoked activity influenced the decoding accuracy more than nonword-evoked activity did. Taken together, these results evidence functional representation of wordforms in bilateral temporal lobes isolated from phonemic or semantic representations.