Data from: Shared and modality-specific brain regions that mediate auditory and visual word comprehension

Visual speech carried by lip movements is an integral part of
communication. Yet, it remains unclear in how far visual and acoustic
speech comprehension are mediated by the same brain regions. Using
multivariate classification of full-brain MEG data, we first probed where
the brain represents acoustically and visually conveyed word identities.
We then tested where these sensory-driven representations are predictive
of participants’ trial-wise comprehension. The comprehension-relevant
representations of auditory and visual speech converged only in anterior
angular and inferior frontal regions and were spatially dissociated from
those representations that best reflected the sensory-driven word
identity. These results provide a neural explanation for the behavioural
dissociation of acoustic and visual speech comprehension and suggest that
cerebral representations encoding word identities may be more
modality-specific than often upheld.