& The visual system of literate adults develops a remarkable perceptual expertise for printed words. To delineate the aspects of this competence intrinsic to the occipitotemporal ‘‘what’ ’ pathway, we studied a patient with bilateral lesions of the occipitoparietal ‘‘where’ ’ pathway. Depending on critical geometric features of the display (rotation angle, letter spacing, mirror reversal, etc.), she switched from a good performance, when her intact ventral pathway was sufficient to encode words, to severely impaired reading, when her parietal lesions prevented the use of alternative reading strategies as a result of spatial and attentional impairments. In particular, reading was disrupted (a) by rotating word by more than 508, providing an approximation of the invariance range for words encoding

The neural substrate for reading includes highly general subsystems, collectively the “reading network”. To the extent these subsystems are indeed universal, they must somehow support reading of a wide variety of languages written in many different ways. In what follows, we examine a small piece of this variety to consider how the neural bases of reading accommodate this variety. In fact, the word “accommodate ” is central to our analysis. We conclude that the reading network must truly accommodate variation in writing systems. That is, the network changes in response to properties of the writing system. In elaborating this conclusion, we first review the structure of writing systems, which is critical for understanding why they might matter, and then review some of the behavioral evidence for the effects of writing systems on reading. We follow with a review of the comparative (across writing system) neuroscience research and finally a report of our recent research that asks how the brain accommodates to learning to read in a second writing system. Word Reading from a Writing System Perspective

The neural substrate for reading includes highly general subsystems, collectively the known as the “reading network. ” To the extent that these subsystems are universal, they must somehow support the reading of a wide range of languages with a diverse set of written forms and mapping principles. In this chapter, we explore the highly contrastive cases of English and Chinese to examine how the neural basis of reading accommodates variability in the structure of languages. The notion of accommodation, in fact, is central to our analysis. We conclude that the reading network must accommodate variation in writing systems by organizing in a way that reflects the properties of each particular writing system. However, we also suggest that the prior state of the network—the organization of the network when there is a previously learned language—influences how the network adapts to those properties specific to a second language. In particular, to some extent, the prior network may assimilate the second language, using its first-language procedures to the extent possible. In elaborating this conclusion, we first review the orthographic structure and phonological mapping principles of Chinese and English, with some attention to how these two writing systems are learned by native speakers. We follow with a review of the comparative (across writing system) neuroscience research, and explore what the differences in brain regions used for Chinese and English might tell us about how these writing systems are processed. Finally, we review recent research that asks how the brain accommodates learning to read a second writing system.

Abstract not found

The neural substrate for reading includes highly general subsystems, collectively the “reading network”. To the extent these subsystems are indeed universal, they must somehow support reading of a wide variety of languages written in many different ways. In what follows, we examine a small piece of this variety to consider how the neural bases of reading accommodate this variety. In fact, the word “accommodate ” is central to our analysis. We conclude that the reading network must truly accommodate variation in writing systems. That is, the network changes in response to properties of the writing system. In elaborating this conclusion, we first review the structure of writing systems, which is critical for understanding why they might matter, and then review some of the behavioral evidence for the effects of writing systems on reading. We follow with a review of the comparative (across writing system) neuroscience research and finally a report of our recent research that asks how the brain accommodates to learning to read in a second writing system.

A key issue that continues to generate controversy concerns the nature of the psychological, computational, and neural mechanisms that support the visual recognition of objects such as faces and words. While some researchers claim that visual recognition is accomplished by category-specific modules dedicated to processing distinct object classes, other researchers have argued for a more distributed system with only partially specialized cortical regions. Considerable evidence from both functional neuroimaging and neuropsychology would seem to favour the modular view, and yet close examination of those data reveals rather graded patterns of specialization that support a more distributed account. This paper explores a theoretical middle ground in which the functional specialization of brain regions arises from general principles and constraints on neural representation and learning that operate throughout cortex but that nonetheless have distinct implications for different classes of stimuli. The account is supported by a computational simulation, in the form of an artificial neural network, that illustrates how cooperative and competitive interactions in the formation of neural representations for faces and words account for both their shared and distinctive properties. We set out a series of empirical predictions, which are also examined, and consider the further implications of this account.

doi:10.1111/j.1460-9568.2008.06143.x Imagery or meaning? Evidence for a semantic origin of category-specific brain activity in metabolic imaging