A shared EEG signal for the maintenance of visually and linguistically evoked objects: theta-gamma phase-amplitude coupling

How do our brains represent events in language? Recent work has shown that when we comprehend state-change events, multiple representations corresponding to different states of an object are simultaneously activated. As the sentence unfolds and the object is cued for retrieval, areas of the brain associated with representational conflict show greater activation in proportion to how dissimilar the object-states are to each other. Before being retrieved, however, these object-states have to be actively maintained in the brain. What are the neural mechanisms by which we do so? Across two EEG experiments, we present evidence that, during sentence processing, the maintenance of multiple object-states in state-change events is supported by a neural signal that has been frequently linked to visual working memory: left temporal theta-gamma phase-amplitude coupling.