Effects of lexicality, frequency, and spelling-to-sound consistency on the functional anatomy of reading.
Functional neuroimaging was used to investigate three factors that affect reading performance: first, whether a stimulus is a word or pronounceable non-word (lexicality), second, how often a word is encountered (frequency), and third, whether the pronunciation has a predictable spelling-to-sound correspondence (consistency). Comparisons between word naming (reading) and visual fixation scans revealed stimulus-related activation differences in seven regions. A left frontal region showed effects of consistency and lexicality, indicating a role in orthographic to phonological transformation. Motor cortex showed an effect of consistency bilaterally, suggesting that motoric processes beyond high-level representations of word phonology influence reading performance. Implications for the integration of these results into theoretical models of word reading are discussed.
Fiez
J A
JA
Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15260, USA. fiez+@pitt.edu
Balota
D A
DA
Raichle
M E
ME
Petersen
S E
SE
D000328:Adult; D001921:Brain / Q000033:anatomy & histology* / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging / Q000502:physiology*; D002531:Cerebellum / Q000502:physiology; D005260:Female; D005625:Frontal Lobe / Q000502:physiology; D006179:Gyrus Cinguli / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009044:Motor Cortex / Q000502:physiology; D010700:Phonetics; D011932:Reading; D014055:Tomography, Emission-Computed; D014825:Vocabulary