Neural dynamics during the vocalization of ‘uh’ or ‘um’

DOI PubMed Open Access

Description

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>People occasionally use filler phrases or pauses, such as “uh”, “um”, or “y’know,” that interrupt the flow of a sentence and fill silent moments between ordinary (non-filler) phrases. It remains unknown which brain networks are engaged during the utterance of fillers. We addressed this question by quantifying event-related cortical high gamma activity at 70–110 Hz. During extraoperative electrocorticography recordings performed as part of the presurgical evaluation, patients with drug-resistant focal epilepsy were instructed to overtly explain, in a sentence, ‘<jats:italic>what is in the image</jats:italic>(subject)’, ‘<jats:italic>doing what</jats:italic>(verb)’, ‘<jats:italic>where</jats:italic>(location)’, and ‘<jats:italic>when</jats:italic>(time)’. Time–frequency analysis revealed that the utterance of fillers, compared to that of ordinary words, was associated with a greater magnitude of high gamma augmentation in association and visual cortex of either hemisphere. Our preliminary results raise the hypothesis that filler utterance would often occur when large-scale networks across the association and visual cortex are engaged in cognitive processing, including lexical retrieval as well as verbal working memory and visual scene scanning.</jats:p>

Journal

  • Scientific Reports

    Scientific Reports 10 2020-07-20

    Springer Science and Business Media LLC

Details 詳細情報について

Report a problem

Back to top