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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access originally published online on January 29, 2008
Cerebral Cortex 2008 18(7):1727-1735; doi:10.1093/cercor/bhm202
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Brain Activation for Consonants and Vowels

Manuel Carreiras1,2 and Cathy J. Price3

1 Instituto de Tecnologías Biomédicas, Universidad de La Laguna, Tenerife, 38205, Spain, 2 Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College of London, London, WCIN 3AR, UK, 3 Wellcome Department of Imaging Neuroscience, Institute of Neurology, London, WCIN 3AR, UK

Address correspondence to Manuel Carreiras, PhD, Departamento de Psicología Cognitiva, Facultad de Psicología, Universidad de La Laguna, 38205-Tenerife, Spain. Email: mcarreir{at}ull.es.

Previous behavioral and electrophysiological studies have shown dissociation between consonants and vowels. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate whether vowel and consonant processing differences are expressed in the neuronal activation pattern and whether they are modulated by task. The experimental design involved reading aloud and lexical decision on visually presented pseudowords created by transposing or replacing consonants or vowels in words. During reading aloud, changing vowels relative to consonants increased activation in a right middle temporal area previously associated with prosodic processing of speech input. In contrast, during lexical decision, changing consonants relative to vowels increased activation in a right middle frontal area associated with inhibiting go-responses. The task-sensitive nature of these effects demonstrates that consonants and vowels differ at a processing, rather than stimulus, level. We argue that prosodic processing of vowel changes arise during self-monitoring of speech output, whereas greater inhibition of go-responses to consonant changes follows insufficient lexico-semantic processing when nonwords looking particularly like words must be rejected. Our results are consistent with claims that vowels and consonants place differential demands on prosodic and lexico-semantic processing, respectively. They also highlight the different types of information that can be drawn from functional imaging and neuropsychological studies.

Key Words: consonants and vowels • fMRI • lexico-semantic processing • prosodic processing • transposed letters • visual word recognition


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