Researchers with the Medical College of Wisconsin have unveiled areas of the brain in which the meanings of words are retrieved from memory and processed during language comprehension.
The study was publicized in the Journal of Neuroscience.
In the study, researchers established that word meaning information was represented in numerous high-level cortical areas, in areas not previously considered.
The left hemisphere was more prominently involved in word meanings, although both hemisphere demostrated activity. The brains areas associated with the default mode network were among the most significant areas for processing word meaning.
For the study, researchers used functional MRI and representational similarity analysis searchlight mapping to identify the brain regions where word meaning information activated upon administering a stimuli to the participants on a screen.
From the findings: “These results indicate that during concept retrieval, lexical concepts are represented across a vast expanse of high-level cortical regions, especially in the areas that make up the default mode network, and that these regions encode multimodal experiential information.”
