PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Lucy J. MacGregor
AU  - Rebecca A. Gilbert
AU  - Zuzanna Balewski
AU  - Daniel J. Mitchell
AU  - Sharon W. Erzinclioglu
AU  - Jennifer M. Rodd
AU  - John Duncan
AU  - Evelina Fedorenko
AU  - Matthew H. Davis
TI  - Causal contributions of the domain-general (Multiple Demand) and the language-selective brain networks to perceptual and semantic challenges in speech comprehension
AID  - 10.1101/2022.04.12.487989
DP  - 2022 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2022.04.12.487989
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2022/04/12/2022.04.12.487989.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2022/04/12/2022.04.12.487989.full
AB  - Listening to spoken language engages domain-general Multiple Demand (MD, fronto-parietal) regions of the human brain, in addition to domain-selective (fronto-temporal) language regions, particularly when comprehension is challenging. However, there is limited evidence that the MD network makes a functional contribution to core aspects of comprehension. In a behavioural study of volunteers (n=19) with chronic brain lesions, but without aphasia, we assessed the causal role of these networks in perceiving, comprehending and adapting to challenging spoken sentences. A first task measured word report for acoustically degraded (noise-vocoded) sentences before and after training. Participants with greater damage to MD but not language regions required more vocoder channels to achieve 50% word report indicating impaired perception. Perception improved following training, reflecting adaptation to acoustic degradation, but perceptual learning was unrelated to lesion location or extent. A second task used sentence coherence judgements to measure the speed and accuracy of comprehension of spoken sentences using lower-frequency meanings of semantically ambiguous words. Comprehension accuracy was high and unaffected by lesion location or extent. The availability of the lower-frequency meaning, as measured in a subsequent word association task, increased following comprehension (word-meaning priming). Word-meaning priming was reduced for participants with greater damage to language but not MD regions. We conclude that language and MD networks make dissociable contributions to challenging speech comprehension: using recent experience to update word meaning preferences depends on language specialised regions, whereas the domain-general MD network plays a causal role in reporting words from degraded speech.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.