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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access originally published online on May 5, 2008
Cerebral Cortex 2009 19(1):79-88; doi:10.1093/cercor/bhn060
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© 2008 The Authors
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Spatiotemporal Signatures of Large-Scale Synfire Chains for Speech Processing as Revealed by MEG

Friedemann Pulvermüller1 and Yury Shtyrov1

1 Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge CB2 2EF, UK

Address correspondence to Friedemann Pulvermüller, PhD, Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, 15 Chaucer Road, Cambridge CB2 2EF, UK. Email: friedemann.pulvermuller{at}mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk.

We report a new brain signature of memory trace activation in the human brain revealed by magnetoencephalography and distributed source localization. Spatiotemporal patterns of cortical activation can be picked up in the time course of source images underlying magnetic brain responses to speech and noise stimuli, especially the generators of the magnetic mismatch negativity. We found that acoustic signals perceived as speech elicited a well-defined spatiotemporal pattern of sequential activation of superior–temporal and inferior–frontal cortex, whereas the same identical stimuli, when perceived as noise, did not elicit temporally structured activation. Strength of local sources constituting large-scale spatiotemporal patterns reflected additional lexical and syntactic features of speech. Morphological processing of the critical sound as verb inflection led to particularly pronounced early left inferior–frontal activation, whereas the same sound functioning as inflectional affix of a noun activated superior–temporal cortex more strongly. We conclude that precisely timed spatiotemporal patterns involving specific cortical areas may represent a brain code of memory circuit activation. These spatiotemporal patterns are best explained in terms of synfire mechanisms linking neuronal populations in different cortical areas. The large-scale synfire chains appear to reflect the processing of stimuli together with the context-dependent perceptual and cognitive information bound to them.

Key Words: inflectional affix • language • MEG • noise • spatiotemporal pattern • speech


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