aalto1 untyped-item.component.html

Cortical Effects of Shifting Letter Position in Letter Strings of Varying Length

Loading...
Thumbnail Image

Access rights

© 2003 MIT Press. This is the final version of the article: Cornelissen, Piers ; Tarkiainen, Antti ; Helenius, Päivi ; Salmelin, Riitta. 2003. Cortical Effects of Shifting Letter Position in Letter Strings of Varying Length. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. Volume 15, Issue 5. P. 731-746. ISSN 0898-929X (printed). DOI: 10.1162/jocn.2003.15.5.731, which has been published in final form at http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/jocn.2003.15.5.731#.VVl5sGOkuSo
Final published version

URL

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

School of Science | A1 Alkuperäisartikkeli tieteellisessä aikakauslehdessä

Date

Major/Subject

Mcode

Degree programme

Language

en

Pages

731-746

Series

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Volume 15, Issue 5

Abstract

Neuroimaging and lesion studies suggest that occipitotemporal brain areas play a necessary role in recognizing a wide variety of objects, be they faces, letters, numbers, or household items. However, many questions remain regarding the details of exactly what kinds of information are processed by the occipito-temporal cortex. Here, we address this question with respect to reading. Ten healthy adult subjects performed a single word reading task. We used whole-head magnetoencephalography to measure the spatio-temporal dynamics of brain responses, and investigated their sensitivity to: (1) lexicality (defined here as the difference between words and consonant strings), (2) word length, and (3) variation in letter position. Analysis revealed that midline occipital activity around 100 msec, consistent with low-level visual feature analysis, was insensitive to lexicality and variation in letter position, but was slightly affected by string length. Bilateral occipito-temporal activations around 150 msec were insensitive to lexicality and reacted to word length only in the timing (and not strength) of activation. However, vertical shifts in letter position revealed a hemispheric imbalance: The right hemisphere activation increased with the shifts, whereas the opposite pattern was evident in the left hemisphere. The results are discussed in the light of Caramazza and Hillis's (1990) model of early reading.

Description

Other note

Citation

Cornelissen, Piers & Tarkiainen, Antti & Helenius, Päivi & Salmelin, Riitta. 2003. Cortical Effects of Shifting Letter Position in Letter Strings of Varying Length. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. Volume 15, Issue 5. P. 731-746. ISSN 0898-929X (printed). DOI: 10.1162/jocn.2003.15.5.731.

Endorsement

Review

Supplemented By

Referenced By