title: Disruption of spelling-to-sound correspondence mapping during single-word reading in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy.
abstract: Processing and/or hemispheric differences in the neural bases of word recognition were examined in patients with long-standing, medically-intractable epilepsy localized to the left (N=18) or right (N=7) temporal lobe. Participants were asked to read words that varied in the frequency of their spelling-to-sound correspondences. For the right temporal lobe group, reaction times (RTs) showed the same pattern across spelling-to-sound correspondence conditions as previously reported for normal participants. For the left temporal lobe group, however, the pattern of RTs suggested a greater relative influence of orthographic frequency than rime frequency, such that performance was worse on words whose orthographic body was less frequent in the language. We discuss these results in terms of differences in processing between the two cerebral hemispheres: the results for the right-temporal lobe patients are taken to support connectionist models of reading as described for the dominant (left) hemisphere, while results for the left-temporal lobe patients support a view of the right hemisphere as relatively less sensitive to phonology and relatively more sensitive to orthography.
authors.affiliation: Cognitive Neurology/Neuropsychology, Department of Neurology, The Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, United States. kledoux1@jhmi.edu
authors.forename: Kerry
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Ledoux
authors.forename: Barry
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Gordon
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001931:Brain Mapping; D032882:Comprehension / Q000502:physiology*; D004569:Electroencephalography; D004833:Epilepsy, Temporal Lobe / Q000503:physiopathology*; D007839:Functional Laterality / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008875:Middle Aged; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D011932:Reading; D021641:Recognition, Psychology