Neural correlates of phonetic categorization under auditory (phoneme) and visual (grapheme) modalities

This study assessed the neural mechanisms and relative saliency of categorization for speech sounds and comparable graphemes (i.e., visual letters) of the same phonetic label. Given that linguistic experience shapes categorical processing, and letter-speech sound matching plays a crucial role during early reading acquisition, we hypothesized sound phoneme and visual grapheme tokens representing the same linguistic identity might recruit common neural substrates, despite originating from different sensory modalities. Behavioral and neuroelectric brain responses (ERPs) were acquired as participants categorized stimuli from sound (phoneme) and homologous letter (grapheme) continua each spanning a /da/-/ga/ gradient. Behaviorally, listeners were faster and showed stronger categorization of phoneme compared to graphemes. At the neural level, multidimensional scaling of the EEG revealed responses self-organized in a categorial fashion such that tokens clustered within their respective modality beginning ∼150-250 ms after stimulus onset. Source-resolved ERPs further revealed modality-specific and overlapping brain regions supporting phonetic categorization. Left inferior frontal gyrus and auditory cortex showed stronger responses for sound category members compared to phonetically ambiguous tokens, whereas early visual cortices paralleled this categorical organization for graphemes. Auditory and visual categorization also recruited common visual association areas in extrastriate cortex but in opposite hemispheres (auditory = left; visual = right). Our findings reveal both auditory and visual sensory cortex supports categorical organization for phonetic labels within their respective modalities. However, a partial overlap in phoneme and grapheme processing among occipital brain areas implies the presence of an isomorphic, domain-general mapping for phonetic categories in dorsal visual system.