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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access published online on November 17, 2009
Cerebral Cortex, doi:10.1093/cercor/bhp245
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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/2.5/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Neural Systems for Reading Aloud: A Multiparametric Approach

William W. Graves1, Rutvik Desai1, Colin Humphries1, Mark S. Seidenberg2 and Jeffrey R. Binder1

1 Department of Neurology, Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, WI 53226, USA, 2 Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI 53706, USA

Address correspondence to William W. Graves, PhD, Medical College of Wisconsin, Functional Imaging Research Center, MEB 4550, 8701 Watertown Plank Road, Milwaukee, WI 53226, USA. Email: wgraves{at}mcw.edu.

Reading aloud involves computing the sound of a word from its visual form. This may be accomplished 1) by direct associations between spellings and phonology and 2) by computation from orthography to meaning to phonology. These components have been studied in behavioral experiments examining lexical properties such as word frequency; length in letters or phonemes; spelling–sound consistency; semantic factors such as imageability, measures of orthographic, or phonological complexity; and others. Effects of these lexical properties on specific neural systems, however, are poorly understood, partially because high intercorrelations among lexical factors make it difficult to determine if they have independent effects. We addressed this problem by decorrelating several important lexical properties through careful stimulus selection. Functional magnetic resonance imaging data revealed distributed neural systems for mapping orthography directly to phonology, involving left supramarginal, posterior middle temporal, and fusiform gyri. Distinct from these were areas reflecting semantic processing, including left middle temporal gyrus/inferior-temporal sulcus, bilateral angular gyrus, and precuneus/posterior cingulate. Left inferior frontal regions generally showed increased activation with greater task load, suggesting a more general role in attention, working memory, and executive processes. These data offer the first clear evidence, in a single study, for the separate neural correlates of orthography–phonology mapping and semantic access during reading aloud.

Key Words: language • orthography • phonology • reading • semantics


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