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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access published online on June 26, 2009
Cerebral Cortex, doi:10.1093/cercor/bhp123
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© 2009 The Authors
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Reading Aloud Boosts Connectivity through the Putamen

Mohamed L. Seghier and Cathy J. Price

Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, Institute of Neurology, UCL, London WC1N 3BG, UK

Address correspondence to email: m.seghier{at}fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk.

Functional neuroimaging and lesion studies have frequently reported thalamic and putamen activation during reading and speech production. However, it is currently unknown how activity in these structures interacts with that in other reading and speech production areas. This study investigates how reading aloud modulates the neuronal interactions between visual recognition and articulatory areas, when both the putamen and thalamus are explicitly included. Using dynamic causal modeling in skilled readers who were reading regularly spelled English words, we compared 27 possible pathways that might connect the ventral anterior occipito-temporal sulcus (aOT) to articulatory areas in the precentral cortex (PrC). We focused on whether the neuronal interactions within these pathways were increased by reading relative to picture naming and other visual and articulatory control conditions. The results provide strong evidence that reading boosts the aOT–PrC pathway via the putamen but not the thalamus. However, the putamen pathway was not exclusive because there was also evidence for another reading pathway that did not involve either the putamen or the thalamus. We conclude that the putamen plays a special role in reading but this is likely to vary with individual reading preferences and strategies.

Key Words: dynamic causal modeling • effective connectivity • functional MRI • subcortical structures • word reading


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