A dual-route perspective on brain activation in response to visual words: Evidence for a length by lexicality interaction in the visual word form area (VWFA)

Abstract

Based on our previous work, we expected the Visual Word Form Area (VWFA) in the left ventral visual pathway to be engaged by both whole-word recognition and by serial sublexical coding of letter strings. To examine this double function, a phonological lexical decision task (i.e., "Does xxx sound like an existing word?") presented short and long letter strings of words, pseudohomophones, and pseudowords (e.g., Taxi, Taksi and Tazi). Main findings were that the length effect for words was limited to occipital regions and absent in the VWFA. In contrast, a marked length effect for pseudowords was found throughout the ventral visual pathway including the VWFA, as well as in regions presumably engaged by visual attention and silent-articulatory processes. The length by lexicality interaction on brain activation corresponds to well-established behavioral findings of a length by lexicality interaction on naming latencies and speaks for the engagement of the VWFA by both lexical and sublexical processes.

Occipital and orbitofrontal hemodynamics during naturally paced reading: An fNIRS study

“…The activation of visual feature representations in an interactive activation model is associated with neural activation in the occipital cortex (Grainger & Jacobs, 1996;McClelland & Rumelhart, 1981;Schurz et al, 2010;Vinckier et al, 2007). In bottom-up processing, visual features activate letters, which in turn activate word representations.…”

“…In bottom-up processing, visual features activate letters, which in turn activate word representations. These letter and word layers can be associated with more anterior regions in the ventral visual stream (Schurz et al, 2010;Vinckier et al, 2007). The scientific community seems to converge on the opinion, however, that these representations interface to higher order processes such as semantic associations between words (Dehaene & Cohen, 2011;Price &Devlin, 2011).…”

Treatment Results Evaluation in Patients With Severe Sepsis, Caused by Severe Traumatic Brain Injury at Intensive Care Unit of Ternopil University Hospital

“…STBI stays one of the main reasons of humans' mortality until the age of 40 [1]. In Great Britain STBI frequency is 1 500 people per every 100 000 of population.…”

Seeing is knowing? Visual word recognition in non-dyslexic and dyslexic readers: An ERP study

“…According to the indirect (sub-lexical) route, the meaning is accessed from print to semantics via phonology, when low-frequency words are used. This model highlights discrete stages of word recognition processed in a cascaded flow dynamic (e.g., Schrifiers et al 1990;Hauk et al, 2006;Schurz et al, 2010). However, this view is currently challenged with neuroimaging studies suggesting parallel processing of all operations and simultaneous feed-forward and top-down functional linkage of the brain areas involved in reading (e.g., Devlin et al, 2006).…”

“…Some behavioural and neuroimaging research carried out with dyslexic children highlights deviations already in early stages of processing (van der Mark et al, 2009;Schulz et al, 2008). However, the dynamics of higher order functions, such as recognition of phonological and semantic features in visual word form is not very clear in dyslexic readers (e.g., Wimmer et al, 2010;Kherif et al, 2011). …”