{"doi":"10.1101/2022.04.12.487989","title":"Causal contributions of the domain-general (Multiple Demand) and the language-selective brain networks to perceptual and semantic challenges in speech comprehension","abstract":"1. Abstract 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.","journal":"bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)","year":2022,"id":299982,"datarank":0.20794415416798362,"base_score":1.3862943611198906,"endowment":1.3862943611198906,"self_citation_contribution":0.20794415416798362,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.20794415416798362,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":3,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9512,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2022-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":899802,"name":"Rebecca A. Gilbert","orcid":"0000-0003-4574-7792","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":899803,"name":"Zuzanna Balewski","orcid":"0000-0001-6488-929X","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":899804,"name":"Daniel J. Mitchell","orcid":"0000-0001-8729-3886","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":899805,"name":"Sharon Erzinçlioğlu","orcid":"0000-0003-0290-4997","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":899806,"name":"Jennifer M. Rodd","orcid":"0000-0002-8608-7244","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":230857,"name":"John Duncan","orcid":"0000-0002-9695-2764","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":235208,"name":"Evelina Fedorenko","orcid":"0000-0003-3823-514X","position":7,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":563592,"name":"Matthew H. Davis","orcid":"0000-0003-2239-0778","position":8,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":899801,"name":"Lucy MacGregor","orcid":"0000-0002-1062-9529","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":144,"raw_metadata":{"citation_network_status":"fetched"},"created_at":"2026-07-19T00:31:49.412501Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}