Abstract
Reading familiar words differs from reading unfamiliar non-words in two ways. First, word reading is faster and more accurate than reading of unfamiliar non-words. Second, effects of letter length are reduced for words, particularly when they are presented in the right visual field in familiar formats. Two experiments are reported in which right-handed participants read aloud non-words presented briefly in their left and right visual fields before and after training on those items. The non-words were interleaved with familiar words in the naming tests. Before training, naming was slow and error prone, with marked effects of length in both visual fields. After training, fewer errors were made, naming was faster, and the effect of length was much reduced in the right visual field compared with the left. We propose that word learning creates orthographic word forms in the mid-fusiform gyrus of the left cerebral hemisphere. Those word forms allow words to access their phonological and semantic representations on a lexical basis. But orthographic word forms also interact with more posterior letter recognition systems in the middle/inferior occipital gyri, inducing more parallel processing of right visual field words than is possible for any left visual field stimulus, or for unfamiliar non-words presented in the right visual field.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 3675-3696 |
| Number of pages | 22 |
| Journal | Philosophical Transactions Of The Royal Society Of London Series B - Biological Sciences |
| Volume | 364 |
| Issue number | 1536 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 27 Dec 2009 |
Keywords
- word learning
- reading
- hemispheres
- visual fields
- word length
- case alternation
- ORTHOGRAPHIC NEIGHBORHOOD SIZE
- INTERACTIVE ACTIVATION MODEL
- EVENT-RELATED FMRI
- READING ALOUD
- FORM AREA
- OCCIPITOTEMPORAL CORTEX
- LEXICAL ACCESS
- SPLIT-FOVEA
- LANGUAGE DOMINANCE
- LETTER PERCEPTION