Lipreading a naturalistic narrative in a female population: Neural characteristics shared with listening and reading

IntroductionFew of us are skilled lipreaders while most struggle with the task. Neural substrates that enable comprehension of connected natural speech via lipreading are not yet well understood. MethodsWe used a data-driven approach to identify brain areas underlying the lipreading of an 8-min narrative with participants whose lipreading skills varied extensively (range 6-100%, mean = 50.7%). The participants also listened to and read the same narrative. The similarity between individual participants' brain activity during the whole narrative, within and between conditions, was estimated by a voxel-wise comparison of the Blood Oxygenation Level Dependent (BOLD) signal time courses. ResultsInter-subject correlation (ISC) of the time courses revealed that lipreading, listening to, and reading the narrative were largely supported by the same brain areas in the temporal, parietal and frontal cortices, precuneus, and cerebellum. Additionally, listening to and reading connected naturalistic speech particularly activated higher-level linguistic processing in the parietal and frontal cortices more consistently than lipreading, probably paralleling the limited understanding obtained via lip-reading. Importantly, higher lipreading test score and subjective estimate of comprehension of the lipread narrative was associated with activity in the superior and middle temporal cortex. ConclusionsOur new data illustrates that findings from prior studies using well-controlled repetitive speech stimuli and stimulus-driven data analyses are also valid for naturalistic connected speech. Our results might suggest an efficient use of brain areas dealing with phonological processing in skilled lipreaders.

Automated summary

This study used a data-driven approach to explore the neural mechanisms underlying comprehension of connected natural speech through lipreading. The results showed that the brain areas involved in lipreading, listening, and reading were largely overlapping, including the temporal, parietal, frontal cortices, precuneus, and cerebellum. However, lipreading showed less activity in higher-level linguistic processing compared to listening and reading. The lipreading test score and subjective comprehension of the lipread narrative were associated with activity in the temporal cortex.