Identification of the regions involved in phonological assembly using a novel paradigm.
Here we adopt a novel strategy to investigate phonological assembly. Participants performed a visual lexical decision task in English in which the letters in words and letterstrings were delivered either sequentially (promoting phonological assembly) or simultaneously (not promoting phonological assembly). A region of interest analysis confirmed that regions previously associated with phonological assembly, in studies contrasting different word types (e.g. words versus pseudowords), were also identified using our novel task that controls for a number of confounding variables. Specifically, the left pars opercularis, the superior part of the ventral precentral gyrus and the supramarginal gyrus were all recruited more during sequential delivery than simultaneous delivery, even when various psycholinguistic characteristics of the stimuli were controlled. This suggests that sequential delivery of orthographic stimuli is a useful tool to explore how readers, with various levels of proficiency, use sublexical phonological processing during visual word recognition.
ESRC Deafness, Cognition and Language Research Centre, University College London, UK; Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, UK.
Tae
T
Twomey
ESRC Deafness, Cognition and Language Research Centre, University College London, UK.
Dafydd
D
Waters
Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, Institute of Neurology, University College London, UK.
Cathy J
CJ
Price
LREN, Department of Clinical Neurosciences, CHUV, University of Lausanne, Switzerland.
Ferath
F
Kherif
ESRC Deafness, Cognition and Language Research Centre, University College London, UK.
Bencie
B
Woll
ESRC Deafness, Cognition and Language Research Centre, University College London, UK; Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, UK. Electronic address: m.macsweeney@ucl.ac.uk.
Mairéad
M
MacSweeney
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D001931:Brain Mapping; D005260:Female; D005625:Frontal Lobe / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D010296:Parietal Lobe / Q000502:physiology; D010700:Phonetics; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D011932:Reading; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology; D055815:Young Adult
Lexical decision; Pars opercularis; Pars triangularis; Phonological assembly; Phonological memory; Precentral gyrus; Reading; Supramarginal gyrus; fMRI