Global Monitoring of Dynamic Functional Interactions in the Brain During Chinese Verbs Perception

Previous studies suggested that during speech perception and processing, auditory analyses clearly took place in the auditory cortices in the temporal lobes bilaterally, semantic processing was supported by a temporo-frontal network which strongly lateralized to the left hemisphere while a prosodic processing network mainly located in right hemisphere. However, some studies proposed that the linguistic abilities such as phonology and semantics recruited regions in both hemispheres. To understand the neural mechanism underlying speech perception and processing, it is important to uncover the dynamic functional interaction in the brain. Our aim is to investigate whether a prevalent human brain network exists during perceiving Chinese verbs and how the effective connectivity changes in spatial and temporal domains. An auditory listening experiment was carried out to monitor the brain activations in full-time scale by using the electroencephalograph (EEG) signals recording when native subjects perceiving Mandarin verbs. By performing a Granger causality analysis and statistical analysis, six connection patterns in different time periods were constructed under global monitoring of dynamic brain activities. The results showed different connections and inter-regional information flows in six time intervals. It can be indicated from this study that the bilateral hemispheres not only involves in the speech perception and processing, but also have information interaction. The results are essential for the more detailed bilateral brain network analysis with full-time monitoring in future studies.