Pictures of a thousand words: investigating the neural mechanisms of reading with extremely rapid event-related fMRI.
Reading is one of the most important skills human beings can acquire, but has proven difficult to study naturalistically using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We introduce a novel Event-Related Reading (ERR) fMRI approach that enables reliable estimation of the neural correlates of single-word processing during reading of rapidly presented narrative text (200-300 ms/word). Application to an fMRI experiment in which subjects read coherent narratives and made no overt responses revealed widespread effects of orthographic, phonological, contextual, and semantic variables on brain activation. Word-level variables predicted activity in classical language areas as well as the inferotemporal visual word form area, specifically supporting a role for the latter in mapping visual forms onto articulatory or acoustic representations. Additional analyses demonstrated that ERR results replicate across experiments and predict reading comprehension. The ERR approach represents a powerful and extremely flexible new approach for studying reading and language behavior with fMRI.
Department of Psychology, Washington University, One Brookings Drive, Saint Louis, MO 63130, USA. tyarkoni@wustl.edu
Tal
T
Yarkoni
Nicole K
NK
Speer
David A
DA
Balota
Mark P
MP
McAvoy
Jeffrey M
JM
Zacks
D000328:Adult; D000465:Algorithms; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D032882:Comprehension / Q000502:physiology*; D005074:Evoked Potentials, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging / Q000379:methods*; D008297:Male; D011932:Reading; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult