Evidence for highly selective neuronal tuning to whole words in the "visual word form area".

Neuron

Department of Neuroscience, Georgetown University Medical Center, Research Building Room WP-12, 3970 Reservoir Road NW, Washington, DC 20007, USA.

Published: April 2009

Theories of reading have posited the existence of a neural representation coding for whole real words (i.e., an orthographic lexicon), but experimental support for such a representation has proved elusive. Using fMRI rapid adaptation techniques, we provide evidence that the human left ventral occipitotemporal cortex (specifically the "visual word form area," VWFA) contains a representation based on neurons highly selective for individual real words, in contrast to current theories that posit a sublexical representation in the VWFA.

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http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2706007PMC
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2009.03.017DOI Listing

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