A Parametric Approach to Orthographic Processing in the Brain: An fMRI Study
Abstract
Brain activation studies of orthographic stimuli typically start with the premise that different types of orthographic strings (e.g., words, pseudowords) differ from each other in discrete ways, which should be reflected in separate and distinct areas of brain activation. The present study starts from a different premise: Words, pseudowords, letterstrings, and false fonts vary systematically across a continuous dimension of familiarity to English readers. Using a one-back matching task to force encoding of the stimuli, the four types of stimuli were visually presented to healthy adult subjects while fMRI activations were obtained. Data analysis focused on parametric comparisons of fMRI activation sites. We did not find any region that was exclusively activated for real words. Rather, differences among these string types were mainly expressed as graded changes in the balance of activations among the regions. Our results suggest that there is a widespread network of brain regions that form a common network for the processing of all orthographic string types.
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Activation for written words was less than that for unfamiliar pseudowords or pictures of objects.
“At the functional level, the abstract visual word processing claim was challenged by observations that activation for written words (that have abstract visual word form representations) was less than that for stimuli that don't have abstract word representations such as (a) unfamiliar pseudowords (Brunswick et al., 1999; Fujimaki et al., 1999; Tagamets et al., 2000; Xu et al., 2001) or (b) pict”
From A review and synthesis of the first 20years of PET and fMRI studies of heard speech, spoken language and reading (2012) · cites this paper as Tagamets et al., 2000
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- Authors
- Tagamets, M. A., Novick, J. M., Chalmers, M. L., & Friedman, R. B.
- Affiliations
- Georgetown University Medical Center (US)
- Venue
- Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
- Publisher
- MIT Press - Journals
- Published
- 2000-03-01
- Volume
- 12
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 281-297
- ISSN
- 0898-929X (ISSN-L)
- 1530-8898
- OpenAlex
- W2130618843
- Cited by
- 224
- References
- 52
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2025: 1 · 2024: 2 · 2023: 6 · 2022: 1 · 2021: 4 · 2020: 1 · 2019: 4 · 2018: 7 · 2017: 3 · 2016: 5 · 2015: 7 · 2014: 11 · 2013: 7 · 2012: 15
- FWCI
- 22.98
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- Georgetown University
- Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (R01HD036019, R01HD36019)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Reading and Literacy Development
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Face Recognition and Perception
- Keywords
- orthographic processing, word recognition, pseudowords, familiarity, parametric study, visual word processing, brain activation
- MeSH terms
- Adult, Brain, Brain Mapping, Female, Humans, Language, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Male, Middle Aged, Parietal Lobe, Reading, Temporal Lobe, Visual Pathways, Writing, Models, Statistical
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