The VWFA Is the Home of Orthographic Learning When Houses Are Used as Letters

Martin, Lea; Durisko, Corrine; Moore, Michelle W.; Coutanche, Marc N.; Chen, Deborah; Fiez, Julie A.

doi:10.1523/eneuro.0425-17.2019

Cited by 16 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…Developmental studies indicate that the print-sensitive response of the VWFA shows a rapid development in the first few months and years of learning to read 26 – 33 and that it is initiated by grapheme-phoneme correspondence training in children 26 , 29 , 34 and adults 35 , 36 . The location of the emerging print-sensitive area within the vOT seems constrained by its established connectivity to language regions long before children learn to read at school 13 , 37 and develops in cortical patches with only weak specialization 29 .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Visual word form processing deficits driven by severity of reading impairments in children with developmental dyslexia

Brem

Maurer

Kronbichler

et al. 2020

Sci Rep

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The visual word form area (VWFA) in the left ventral occipito-temporal (vOT) cortex is key to fluent reading in children and adults. Diminished VWFA activation during print processing tasks is a common finding in subjects with severe reading problems. Here, we report fMRI data from a multicentre study with 140 children in primary school (7.9–12.2 years; 55 children with dyslexia, 73 typical readers, 12 intermediate readers). All performed a semantic task on visually presented words and a matched control task on symbol strings. With this large group of children, including the entire spectrum from severely impaired to highly fluent readers, we aimed to clarify the association of reading fluency and left vOT activation during visual word processing. The results of this study confirm reduced word-sensitive activation within the left vOT in children with dyslexia. Interestingly, the association of reading skills and left vOT activation was especially strong and spatially extended in children with dyslexia. Thus, deficits in basic visual word form processing increase with the severity of reading disability but seem only weakly associated with fluency within the typical reading range suggesting a linear dependence of reading scores with VFWA activation only in the poorest readers.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Visual word form processing deficits driven by severity of reading impairments in children with developmental dyslexia

Brem

Maurer

Kronbichler

et al. 2020

Sci Rep

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“…A dorsal pathway underpins phonologically mediated reading, and a ventral pathway underpins direct access to meaning from print. The Visual Word Form Area (VWFA) is used "as a word letterbox" (Dehaene 2010) but is also used for other purposes (Vogel 2012, Moore 2014, Martin 2019. Many further cortical areas will be involved when meaningful reading occurs, for example reading stories with an emotional impact, and the brain engages with that meaning in its social context.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neuroscience and Literacy: An Integrative View

Ellis

Bloch

2020

Preprint

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Significant challenges exist globally regarding literacy teaching and learning, particularly in poor socio-economic settings in countries of the Global South. In this paper we argue that to address these challenges, major features of how the brain works that are currently ignored in the educational literature should be taken into account. First, perception is an active process based in detection of errors in hierarchical predictions of sensory data and action outcomes. Reading is a particular case. Second, emotions play a key role in underlying cognitive functioning. Innate affective systems underlie and shape all brain functioning, including oral and written forms of language and sign. Third, there is not the fundamental difference between listening/speaking and reading/writing often alleged on the basis of evolutionary arguments. Both are socio-cultural practices driven and learnt by the communication imperative of the social brain. Fourth, like listening, reading is not a linear, bottom-up process. Both are non-linear contextually shaped psycho-social processes of understanding, shaped by current knowledge and cultural contexts and practices. Reductionist neuroscience studies which focus on decontextualized parts of reading cannot access all the relevant processes. An integrated view of brain function reflecting this non-linear nature implies that an ongoing focus on personal meaning and understanding provides positive conditions for all aspects of literacy learning. Assessment of literacy teaching at all its stages should include indicators that take into account these foundational features relating reading and writing to neuroscience.

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“…(Hannagan et al, 2015;Hasson et al, 2002;Szwed et al, 2011). However, this view fell in disfavor when it was found that, when participants were trained to "read" words written in unusual fonts made of faces or houses, those non-letterlike reading stimuli continue to activate the VWFA during reading (Martin et al, 2019;Moore et al, 2014). More recently it was suggested that the connectivity to other brain regions might be an important factor (Hannagan et al, 2015;Saygin et al, 2016).…”

Section: Functional Connectivity Of the Vwfa And Of The Ffamentioning

confidence: 99%

Evolution of reading and face circuits during the first three years of reading acquisition

Feng¹,

Monzalvo²,

Dehaene³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Although words and faces activate neighboring regions in the fusiform gyrus, we lack an understanding of how this category selectivity emerges during development. To investigate the organization of reading and face circuits at the earliest stage of reading acquisition, we measured the fMRI responses to words, faces, houses, and checkerboards in three groups of 60 children: 6-year-old pre-readers, 6-year-old beginning readers and 9-year-old advanced readers. The results showed that specific responses to written words were absent prior to reading, but emerged in beginning readers, irrespective of age. Likewise, specific responses to faces were weak or absent in pre-readers, but they emerged more slowly and continued to evolve in the 9-year-olds, primarily driven by age rather than by schooling. Crucially, the sectors of ventral visual cortex that become specialized words and faces harbored their own functional connectivity prior to reading acquisition: the VWFA with left-hemispheric spoken language areas, and the FFA with the contralateral region and the amygdalae. The results support the view that reading acquisition occurs through the recycling of a pre-existing but plastic circuit which, in pre-readers, already connects the VWFA site to other distant language areas. Furthermore, reading acquisition does not compete with the face system directly, through a pruning of preexisting face responses, but indirectly, by partially reorienting the slow growth of face responses to the right hemisphere.

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The VWFA Is the Home of Orthographic Learning When Houses Are Used as Letters

Cited by 16 publications

References 37 publications

Visual word form processing deficits driven by severity of reading impairments in children with developmental dyslexia

Visual word form processing deficits driven by severity of reading impairments in children with developmental dyslexia

Neuroscience and Literacy: An Integrative View

Evolution of reading and face circuits during the first three years of reading acquisition

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