Intact reading ability despite lacking a canonical visual word form area in an individual born without the left superior temporal lobe
Name
Intact reading ability despite lacking a canonical visual word form area in an individual born without the left superior temporal lobe.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
3.73 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
49f9505a028a177942b53314d2ea898b
Author(s)
Li, Jin
Kean, Hope
Fedorenko, Evelina
Saygin, Zeynep
Date Issued
January 18, 2023
Journal
Cognitive Neuropsychology
Publisher
Informa UK Limited
Citation
Li, Jin, Kean, Hope, Fedorenko, Evelina and Saygin, Zeynep. 2023. "Intact reading ability despite lacking a canonical visual word form area in an individual born without the left superior temporal lobe." Cognitive Neuropsychology.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
The visual word form area (VWFA), a region canonically located within left ventral temporal cortex (VTC), is specialized for orthography in literate adults presumbly due to its connectivity with frontotemporal language regions. But is a typical, left-lateralized language network critical for the VWFA's emergence? We investigated this question in an individual (EG) born without the left superior temporal lobe but who has normal reading ability. EG showed canonical typical face-selectivity bilateraly but no wordselectivity either in right VWFA or in the spared left VWFA. Moreover, in contrast with the idea that the VWFA is simply part of the language network, no part of EG's VTC showed selectivity to higher-level linguistic processing. Interestingly, EG's VWFA showed reliable multivariate patterns that distinguished words from other categories. These results suggest that a typical left-hemisphere language network is necessary for acanonical VWFA, and that orthographic processing can otherwise be supported by a distributed neural code.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1080/02643294.2023.2164923
