A synchronized multimodal neuroimaging dataset for studying brain language processing

Abstract

We present a synchronized multimodal neuroimaging dataset for studying brain language processing (SMN4Lang) that contains functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and magnetoencephalography (MEG) data on the same 12 healthy volunteers while the volunteers listened to 6 hours of naturalistic stories, as well as high-resolution structural (T1, T2), diffusion MRI and resting-state fMRI data for each participant. We also provide rich linguistic annotations for the stimuli, including word frequencies, syntactic tree structures, time-aligned characters and words, and various types of word and character embeddings. Quality assessment indicators verify that this is a high-quality neuroimaging dataset. Such synchronized data is separately collected by the same group of participants first listening to story materials in fMRI and then in MEG which are well suited to studying the dynamic processing of language comprehension, such as the time and location of different linguistic features encoded in the brain. In addition, this dataset, comprising a large vocabulary from stories with various topics, can serve as a brain benchmark to evaluate and improve computational language models.