Marin-Marin Lidon, Eisenhauer Susanne, Gonzalez Alam Tirso R J, Margulies Daniel S, Smallwood Jonathan, Jefferies Elizabeth
Department of Psychology, University of York, York YO10 5NA, United Kingdom
York Neuroimaging Centre, Innovation Way, York YO10 5NY, United Kingdom.
J Neurosci. 2025 May 28;45(22):e1876242025. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1876-24.2025.
Comprehension of spoken and written language involves a hierarchical sequence of modality-specific and heteromodal processes. While these have been localized to different regions, modality-selective responses extend beyond them, implicating large-scale network organization in language comprehension. Dimensions of whole-brain connectivity, derived from intrinsic activity, have been proposed as a general organizing framework for cognition. Here, we test their utility in accounting for the spatial distribution of task-evoked activity during language comprehension. We investigated brain activity in human males and females in response to psycholinguistic variables linked to input processing and meaning in a sentence comprehension task presented both visually and auditorily. Macroscale patterns of brain activity were similar across modalities for sentence-level and semantic variables, but effects of orthographic and phonological distance were negatively correlated between modalities. The first dimension, separating heteromodal and unimodal cortices, showed no differences across modalities for sentence processing and semantic variables and opposite effects of word length and orthographic/phonological distance for spoken and written words, supporting the notion that higher-order processing requires heteromodal resources different to those linked to input processing. The second dimension, separating auditory-motor and visual processes, showed an asymmetry in the recruitment of the unimodal systems-listening to long and semantically dissimilar words involved stronger recruitment of primary auditory-motor regions and low visual engagement. These findings show that the language system is organized according to large-scale axes of intrinsic connectivity, with psycholinguistic processes varying systematically along whole-brain dimensions. This supports the view that language comprehension reflects general principles of cortical organization.
对口语和书面语言的理解涉及一系列特定模态和跨模态的分层过程。虽然这些过程已被定位到不同区域，但模态选择性反应超出了这些区域，这表明在语言理解中存在大规模的网络组织。源自内在活动的全脑连接维度已被提出作为认知的一般组织框架。在这里，我们测试它们在解释语言理解过程中任务诱发活动的空间分布方面的效用。我们在男性和女性中研究了大脑活动，这些活动是对与输入处理和句子理解任务中的意义相关的心理语言学变量的反应，该任务以视觉和听觉方式呈现。对于句子层面和语义变量，跨模态的大脑活动宏观模式相似，但正字法和语音距离的影响在不同模态之间呈负相关。将跨模态和单模态皮层分开的第一维度在句子处理和语义变量的跨模态方面没有差异，并且对于口语和书面单词，单词长度和正字法/语音距离的影响相反，这支持了高阶处理需要与输入处理相关的不同跨模态资源的观点。将听觉运动和视觉过程分开的第二维度在单模态系统的征募方面表现出不对称性——听长且语义不同的单词涉及更强的初级听觉运动区域征募和较低的视觉参与度。这些发现表明，语言系统是根据内在连接的大规模轴组织的，心理语言学过程沿全脑维度系统地变化。这支持了语言理解反映皮层组织一般原则的观点。
