PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - Markus J. van Ackeren AU - Till R. Schneider AU - Kathrin Müsch AU - Shirley-Ann Rueschemeyer TI - Oscillatory Neuronal Activity Reflects Lexical-Semantic Feature Integration within and across Sensory Modalities in Distributed Cortical Networks AID - 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0958-14.2014 DP - 2014 Oct 22 TA - The Journal of Neuroscience PG - 14318--14323 VI - 34 IP - 43 4099 - http://www.jneurosci.org/content/34/43/14318.short 4100 - http://www.jneurosci.org/content/34/43/14318.full SO - J. Neurosci.2014 Oct 22; 34 AB - Research from the previous decade suggests that word meaning is partially stored in distributed modality-specific cortical networks. However, little is known about the mechanisms by which semantic content from multiple modalities is integrated into a coherent multisensory representation. Therefore we aimed to characterize differences between integration of lexical-semantic information from a single modality compared with two sensory modalities. We used magnetoencephalography in humans to investigate changes in oscillatory neuronal activity while participants verified two features for a given target word (e.g., “bus”). Feature pairs consisted of either two features from the same modality (visual: “red,” “big”) or different modalities (auditory and visual: “red,” “loud”). The results suggest that integrating modality-specific features of the target word is associated with enhanced high-frequency power (80–120 Hz), while integrating features from different modalities is associated with a sustained increase in low-frequency power (2–8 Hz). Source reconstruction revealed a peak in the anterior temporal lobe for low-frequency and high-frequency effects. These results suggest that integrating lexical-semantic knowledge at different cortical scales is reflected in frequency-specific oscillatory neuronal activity in unisensory and multisensory association networks.