title: Oscillatory neuronal activity reflects lexical-semantic feature integration within and across sensory modalities in distributed cortical networks.
abstract: Research from the previous decade suggests that word meaning is partially stored in distributed modality-specific cortical networks. However, little is known about the mechanisms by which semantic content from multiple modalities is integrated into a coherent multisensory representation. Therefore we aimed to characterize differences between integration of lexical-semantic information from a single modality compared with two sensory modalities. We used magnetoencephalography in humans to investigate changes in oscillatory neuronal activity while participants verified two features for a given target word (e.g., "bus"). Feature pairs consisted of either two features from the same modality (visual: "red," "big") or different modalities (auditory and visual: "red," "loud"). The results suggest that integrating modality-specific features of the target word is associated with enhanced high-frequency power (80-120 Hz), while integrating features from different modalities is associated with a sustained increase in low-frequency power (2-8 Hz). Source reconstruction revealed a peak in the anterior temporal lobe for low-frequency and high-frequency effects. These results suggest that integrating lexical-semantic knowledge at different cortical scales is reflected in frequency-specific oscillatory neuronal activity in unisensory and multisensory association networks.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of York, York YO10 5DD, United Kingdom, and.
authors.forename: Markus J
authors.initials: MJ
authors.lastname: van Ackeren
authors.affiliation: Department of Neurophysiology and Pathophysiology, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, 20246 Hamburg, Germany.
authors.forename: Till R
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8889-6248
authors.initials: TR
authors.lastname: Schneider
authors.affiliation: Department of Neurophysiology and Pathophysiology, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, 20246 Hamburg, Germany.
authors.forename: Kathrin
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Müsch
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of York, York YO10 5DD, United Kingdom, and sr852@york.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Shirley-Ann
authors.initials: SA
authors.lastname: Rueschemeyer
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001303:Auditory Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D001683:Biological Clocks / Q000502:physiology*; D002540:Cerebral Cortex / Q000502:physiology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D015225:Magnetoencephalography / Q000379:methods; D008297:Male; D009415:Nerve Net / Q000502:physiology*; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D012660:Semantics; D014793:Visual Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: cortical oscillations; language; multisensory integration; semantic memory; visual word processing