Distinct neural sources underlying visual word form processing as revealed by steady state visual evoked potentials (SSVEP)

Cortical latency predicts reading fluency from late childhood to early adolescence

Aging, alzheimer's disease, and word recognition: A review of the recent literature

Reading is a uniquely human skill, learned through extensive experience during childhood, with literacy becoming widespread only in the past few hundred years. Consequently, the neural circuitry underlying language could not have evolved to have circuitry genetically predefined for reading; this is unlike other expert skills such as face recognition, which can be seen in some of our evolutionary ancestors. Therefore, understanding the nature of the reading circuit strikes at the heart of the nature versus nurture debate about how expert skills shape, and are shaped by, brain circuitry. The PNAS article by Lerma-Usabiaga et al. (1) focuses on understanding the specialization of a particular brain territory, the left ventral occipitotemporal cortex (vOTC), known to be critical for visual word recognition. The study uses a combination of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and behavioral methods to carefully dissect two functionally and structurally distinct regions located within the vOTC that contribute to reading. Lerma-Usabiaga et al. (1) were motivated by previous studies that have used functional MRI to localize the “visual word form area” (VWFA). Conceptually, the VWFA is a brain region within the left vOTC that responds preferentially to printed words and word-like stimuli. This orthographic selectivity emerges with the acquisition of literacy, indicating that reading experience tunes this region for skilled reading (2). Indeed, individuals with poorer reading ability exhibit reduced selectivity in the vOTC (3), and damage in adulthood causes acquired alexia, in which printed words can no longer be recognized automatically (4). While researchers agree on these broad facts about the VWFA, they disagree on the precise location of the VWFA and its specific role in reading (4⇓–6). These disagreements could arise because different types of stimulus comparisons weight differentially for perceptual versus linguistic aspects of visual word recognition. Thus, like the proverbial men … [↵][1]1To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: fiez{at}pitt.edu. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1

Lexical Access, Cognitive Psychology of

Automatic activation of phonology in visual word recognition has been well documented. It has been attributed, at least in part, to the sequential development of speech and literacy which results in the tendency for children to match orthographical input to phonological representation at the early stages of literacy development (e.g., Bosman & De Groot, 1996; Davis, Castles, & Iakovidis, 1998; Goswami, 1993). In contrast to the development of speech prior to literacy in first language (L1) acquisition, second language (L2) learners typically learn to speak and read at the same time. This raises the question of whether phonology is also automatically activated in L2 reading. This issue was investigated in this study by exploring the pseudohomophone effect in L2 reading using a lexical decision task. The role of learners’ L1 was also examined by including both alphabetic and non-alphabetic learners of English as L2. A strong pseudohomophone effect was found in reaction time among native English speakers and alphabetic non-native speakers. Non-alphabetic learners, however, showed a pseudohomophone effect in error rate but not in reaction time. The findings were discussed in terms of how learning experiences and L1 background affect phonological activation in visual L2 word recognition.

Perception of a visual target can strongly deteriorate in the presence of flanking elements (crowding). Crowding is the main limiting factor in reading and a major contributor to poor vision in amblyopia. In crowding, elements appear jumbled and thus are hard to recognize. Classic pooling models propose that crowding occurs via pooling of information from low-level to high-level visual areas. Because of pooling, receptive fields become larger and, at final stages, encompass both the target's and flankers' locations. As a result, the brain is unable to perceive the target separately from the flankers. Pooling models predict that adding flankers or increasing the size of the flankers should always increase crowding strength. In a series of previous studies from our laboratory and other groups, this view was shown to be over-simplistic and incomplete. In many situations, crowding can be reduced and good performance recovered by adding flanking elements or by increasing their size. This can occur when flankers ungroup from the target and group with each other. Grouping between elements is thus a key component in crowding. The neural mechanisms of crowding are unknown at the moment. Here, I used EEG to study the time course of crowding and the brain areas involved in the processing of crowding. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), I showed that crowding is a late visual process. In particular, the N1 component of ERPs (around 190 ms) was suppressed in crowding while earlier components did not correlate with crowding. The N1 suppression was caused by reduced neural activity in high-level visual areas such as the lateral occipital cortex. In a second study, I attempted to replicate the results with gabor stimuli. In a third study, I used steady-state visually evoked potentials (ssVEPs) to disentangle target and flanker processing in crowding. In this study, I showed that the target is selectively suppressed when it groups with the flankers. In addition to these three projects on crowding, I worked on time-frequency analysis that I performed on backward masking data in schizophrenia patients.

The present study investigated the representation and processing of segmental and tonal information in visual Chinese word recognition in native and non‐native Chinese readers. Two experiments using homophone judgement paradigm were conducted. When judging two Chinese characters (Experiment 1), both groups showed difficulties when the segmental but not tonal information was shared (i.e., S+T− condition), with stronger interference for non‐native readers. When judging a Pinyin and a Chinese character (Experiment 2), non‐native readers' S+T− disadvantage was significantly reduced. Finally, when their L1s share the Latin alphabets with Pinyin, the participants showed stronger segmental reliance compared with the native readers. These findings suggest that while both native and non‐native readers rely more on segmental information in Chinese visual word recognition, this reliance is stronger among non‐native readers. Furthermore, the alphabetic nature of the Pinyin orthography may help non‐native readers' phonological representation and processing in a nonalphabetic writing system.

The impact of inverted text on visual word processing: An fMRI study

Although interactivity is considered a fundamental principle of cognitive (and computational) models of reading, it has received far less attention in neural models of reading that instead focus on serial stages of feed-forward processing from visual input to orthographic processing to accessing the corresponding phonological and semantic information. In particular, the left ventral occipito-temporal (vOT) cortex is proposed to be the first stage where visual word recognition occurs prior to accessing nonvisual information such as semantics and phonology. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate whether there is evidence that activation in vOT is influenced top-down by the interaction of visual and nonvisual properties of the stimuli during visual word recognition tasks. Participants performed two different types of lexical decision tasks that focused on either visual or nonvisual properties of the word or word-like stimuli. The design allowed us to investigate how vOT activation during visual word recognition was influenced by a task change to the same stimuli and by a stimulus change during the same task. We found both stimulus- and task-driven modulation of vOT activation that can only be explained by top-down processing of nonvisual aspects of the task and stimuli. Our results are consistent with the hypothesis that vOT acts as an interface linking visual form with nonvisual processing in both bottom up and top down directions. Such interactive processing at the neural level is in agreement with cognitive and computational models of reading but challenges some of the assumptions made by current neuro-anatomical models of reading.

Early involvement of dorsal and ventral pathways in visual word recognition: An ERP study

How is a word visually recognized? We investigated word recognition by employing a novel psychophysical task in which word segments (true morphemes or nonmorphemic orthographic sequences) were colored blue/red, red/blue, or black, while participants wore anaglyph glasses. The color combinations split the words either at the morpheme boundary (legal split) or at one character to the left or to the right of the split (illegal split). This manipulation divided the retinal information along the fovea, allowing us to project the different word segments to both left and right hemispheres via contralateral and ipsilateral visual pathways. Our goal was to investigate the roles of morphology and semantics in the early moments of visual word recognition, potentially tapping functional properties of the visual word form area. Participants (N = 72) performed a masked lexical decision task (60 ms exposure) to semantically transparent compounds (e.g., football), monomorphemic pseudocompounds (e.g., shamrock), and unsegmentable monomorphemic words (e.g., jeopardy). We found an effect of legality for compounds and pseudocompounds, when presented via the stronger contralateral visual pathways, suggesting an early morpho-orthographic segmentation, but with true compounds yielding faster and more accurate responses than pseudocompounds across all projection combinations. Our results are compatible with a model of visual word recognition involving an initial stage of morpho-orthographic analysis that is insensitive to semantics, followed by later stages of morphological computations and semantic access. Although our evidence relies on a psychophysical task, we suggest that these processing stages are in line with a functional division between visual word form area-1 (orthographic) and visual word form area-2 (lexical) in the early visual word recognition system. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Lexical access takes place when sensory information is matched to lexical information. The nature of the code in which this match takes place was examined in two experiments. The first experiment looked at auditory lexical processing and found that nonwords took longer to classify as nonwords if they formed the beginnings of real words, regardless of syllable structure. This was in contrast to a second experiment which employed a visual lexical decision task, where nonwords took longer to classify only if they formed the first syllable of a word. It was concluded that the access code that activates lexical information in spoken word recognition is the first few phonemes regardless of syllable structure, whereas in printed word recognition the access code is the first (orthographically defined) syllable.

We report a comprehensive cartography of selective responses to visual letters and words in the human ventral occipito-temporal cortex (VOTC) with direct neural recordings, clarifying key aspects of the neural basis of reading. Intracerebral recordings were performed in a large group of patients (n = 37) presented with visual words inserted periodically in rapid sequences of pseudofonts, nonwords, or pseudowords, enabling classification of responses at three levels of word processing: letter, prelexical, and lexical. While letter-selective responses are found in much of the VOTC, with a higher proportion in left posterior regions, prelexical/lexical responses are confined to the middle and anterior sections of the left fusiform gyrus. This region overlaps with and extends more anteriorly than the visual word form area typically identified with functional magnetic resonance imaging. In this region, prelexical responses provide evidence for populations of neurons sensitive to the statistical regularity of letter combinations independently of lexical responses to familiar words. Despite extensive sampling in anterior ventral temporal regions, there is no hierarchical organization between prelexical and lexical responses in the left fusiform gyrus. Overall, distinct word processing levels depend on neural populations that are spatially intermingled rather than organized according to a strict postero-anterior hierarchy in the left VOTC.

Effects of word length and frequency on the human event-related potential

Preface. How to Use this Book. Section A. Introduction. 1. The Study of Language. Introduction. Why Study Language and Why Is It So Difficult? What is Language? How Has Language Changed Over Time? What is Language For? The History and Methods of Psycholinguistics. Models in Psycholinguistics. Language and the Brain. Themes and Controversies. Summary. Some Questions to Think About. Further Reading. 2. Describing Language. Introduction. How to Describe Speech Sounds. Consonants. Vowels. Syllables. Linguistic Approaches to Syntax. Summary. Some Questions to Think About. Further Reading. Section B. The Biological and Developmental Bases of Language. 3. The Foundations of Language. Introduction. Where Did Language Come From? Do Animals Have Language? The Biological Basis of Language. Is There a Critical Period for Language Development? The Cognitive Basis of Language. The Social Basis of Language. What is the Relation Between Language and Thought? Summary. Some Questions to Think About. Further Reading. 4. Language Development. Introduction. What Drives Language Development. The Language Acquisition Device. Phonological Development. Syntactic Development. Summary. Some Questions to Think About. Further Reading. 5. Bilingualism and Second Language Acquisition. Introduction. Bilingualism. Second Language Acquisition. Evaluation of Work on Bilingualism and Second Language Acquisition. Summary. Some Questions to Think About. Further reading. Section C. Word Recognition. 6. Recognizing Visual Words. Introduction. Basic Methods and Findings. What Makes Word Recognition Easier (or Harder)? Attentional Processes in Visual Word Recognition. Do Different Tasks Give Consistent Results? Is There a Dedicated Visual Word Recognition System? Meaning-based Facilitation of Visual Word Recognition. Processing Morphologically Complex Words. Models of Visual Word Recognition. Coping with Lexical Ambiguity. Summary. Some Questions to Think About. Further Reading. 7. Reading. Introduction. The Writing System. A Preliminary Model of Reading. The Processes of Normal Reading. The Neuroscience of Adult Reading Disorders. Models of Word Naming. Connectionism Models of Dyslexia. Comparison of Models. Summary. Some Questions to Think About. Further Reading. 8. Learning to Read and Spell. Introduction. Normal Reading Development. Phonological Awareness. How Should Reading be Taught? Learning to Spell. Developmental Dyslexia. Summary. Some Questions to Think About. Further Reading. 9. Understanding Speech. Introduction. Recognizing Speech. Models of Speech Recognition. The Neuroscience of Spoken Word Recognition. Summary. Some Questions to Think About. F urther Reading. Section D. Meaning and Using Language. 10. Understanding the Structure of Sentences. Introduction. Dealing with Structural Ambiguity. Early work on Parsing. Processing Structural Ambiguity. Gaps, Traces, and Unbounded Dependencies. The Neuroscience of Parsing. Summary. Some Questions to Think About. Further Reading. 11. Word Meaning. Introduction. Classic Approaches to Semantics. Semantic Networks. Semantic Features. Family Resemblance Models. Combining Concepts. Figurative Language. The Neuroscience of Semantics. Summary. Some Questions to Think About. Further Reading. 12. Comprehension. Introduction. Memory for Text and Inferences. Inferences. References and Ambiguity. Models of Text Processing. Individual Differences in Comprehension Skills. The Neuroscience of Text and Discourse Processing. Summary. Some Questions to Think About. Further Reading. Section E. Production and Other Aspects of Language. 13. Language Production. Introduction. Slips of the Tongue. Syntactic Planning. Lexicalization. Phonological Encoding. The Analysis of Hesitations. The Neuroscience of Speech Production. Writing and Agraphia. Summary. Some Questions to Think About. Further Reading. 14. How Do We Use Language? Introduction. Making Inferences in Conversation. The Structure of Conversation. Collaboration in Dialog. Sound and Vision. Summary. Some Questions to Think About. Further Reading. 15. The Structure of the Language System. Introduction. What are the Modules of Language? How Many Lexicons are There? Language and Short-term Memory. Summary. Some Questions to Think About. Further Reading. 16. New Directions. Introduction. Themes in Psycholinguistics Revisited. Some Growth Areas? Conclusion. Appendix: Connectionism. Interactive Activation Models. Back-propagation. Further Reading. Glossary. Example of Sentence Analysis. References. Author Index. Subject Index.