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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access published online on July 1, 2009
Cerebral Cortex, doi:10.1093/cercor/bhp129
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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.

Auditory Selective Attention to Speech Modulates Activity in the Visual Word Form Area

Yuliya N. Yoncheva1, Jason D. Zevin1, Urs Maurer1,2 and Bruce D. McCandliss1,3

1 Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology, Weill Medical College of Cornell University, New York, NY, USA, 2 Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland, 3 Department of Psychology and Human Development, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA

Address correspondence to Bruce D. McCandliss, PhD, Box 552, 230 Appleton Place, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37203-5721, USA. Email: bruce.mccandliss{at}vanderbilt.edu.

Selective attention to speech versus nonspeech signals in complex auditory input could produce top-down modulation of cortical regions previously linked to perception of spoken, and even visual, words. To isolate such top-down attentional effects, we contrasted 2 equally challenging active listening tasks, performed on the same complex auditory stimuli (words overlaid with a series of 3 tones). Instructions required selectively attending to either the speech signals (in service of rhyme judgment) or the melodic signals (tone-triplet matching). Selective attention to speech, relative to attention to melody, was associated with blood oxygenation level–dependent (BOLD) increases during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in left inferior frontal gyrus, temporal regions, and the visual word form area (VWFA). Further investigation of the activity in visual regions revealed overall deactivation relative to baseline rest for both attention conditions. Topographic analysis demonstrated that while attending to melody drove deactivation equivalently across all fusiform regions of interest examined, attending to speech produced a regionally specific modulation: deactivation of all fusiform regions, except the VWFA. Results indicate that selective attention to speech can topographically tune extrastriate cortex, leading to increased activity in VWFA relative to surrounding regions, in line with the well-established connectivity between areas related to spoken and visual word perception in skilled readers.

Key Words: complex sounds • fusiform gyrus • pure-tone judgment • rhyming • speech perception


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