Effects of lexicality, frequency, and spelling-to-sound consistency on the functional anatomy of reading.

Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15260, USA. fiez+@pitt.edu

Functional neuroimaging was used to investigate three factors that affect reading performance: first, whether a stimulus is a word or pronounceable non-word (lexicality), second, how often a word is encountered (frequency), and third, whether the pronunciation has a predictable spelling-to-sound correspondence (consistency). Comparisons between word naming (reading) and visual fixation scans revealed stimulus-related activation differences in seven regions. A left frontal region showed effects of consistency and lexicality, indicating a role in orthographic to phonological transformation. Motor cortex showed an effect of consistency bilaterally, suggesting that motoric processes beyond high-level representations of word phonology influence reading performance. Implications for the integration of these results into theoretical models of word reading are discussed.

PMID: 10677038 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]