Skip to main content
  • Submit
  • About
    • Editorial Board
    • PNAS Staff
    • FAQ
    • Accessibility Statement
    • Rights and Permissions
    • Site Map
  • Contact
  • Journal Club
  • Subscribe
    • Subscription Rates
    • Subscriptions FAQ
    • Open Access
    • Recommend PNAS to Your Librarian
  • Log in
  • My Cart

Main menu

  • Home
  • Articles
    • Current
    • Latest Articles
    • Special Features
    • Colloquia
    • Collected Articles
    • PNAS Classics
    • Archive
  • Front Matter
  • News
    • For the Press
    • Highlights from Latest Articles
    • PNAS in the News
  • Podcasts
  • Authors
    • Information for Authors
    • Purpose and Scope
    • Editorial and Journal Policies
    • Submission Procedures
    • For Reviewers
    • Author FAQ
  • Submit
  • About
    • Editorial Board
    • PNAS Staff
    • FAQ
    • Accessibility Statement
    • Rights and Permissions
    • Site Map
  • Contact
  • Journal Club
  • Subscribe
    • Subscription Rates
    • Subscriptions FAQ
    • Open Access
    • Recommend PNAS to Your Librarian

User menu

  • Log in
  • My Cart

Search

  • Advanced search
Home
Home

Advanced Search

  • Home
  • Articles
    • Current
    • Latest Articles
    • Special Features
    • Colloquia
    • Collected Articles
    • PNAS Classics
    • Archive
  • Front Matter
  • News
    • For the Press
    • Highlights from Latest Articles
    • PNAS in the News
  • Podcasts
  • Authors
    • Information for Authors
    • Purpose and Scope
    • Editorial and Journal Policies
    • Submission Procedures
    • For Reviewers
    • Author FAQ

New Research In

Physical Sciences

Featured Portals

  • Physics
  • Chemistry
  • Sustainability Science

Articles by Topic

  • Applied Mathematics
  • Applied Physical Sciences
  • Astronomy
  • Computer Sciences
  • Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
  • Engineering
  • Environmental Sciences
  • Mathematics
  • Statistics

Social Sciences

Featured Portals

  • Anthropology
  • Sustainability Science

Articles by Topic

  • Economic Sciences
  • Environmental Sciences
  • Political Sciences
  • Psychological and Cognitive Sciences
  • Social Sciences

Biological Sciences

Featured Portals

  • Sustainability Science

Articles by Topic

  • Agricultural Sciences
  • Anthropology
  • Applied Biological Sciences
  • Biochemistry
  • Biophysics and Computational Biology
  • Cell Biology
  • Developmental Biology
  • Ecology
  • Environmental Sciences
  • Evolution
  • Genetics
  • Immunology and Inflammation
  • Medical Sciences
  • Microbiology
  • Neuroscience
  • Pharmacology
  • Physiology
  • Plant Biology
  • Population Biology
  • Psychological and Cognitive Sciences
  • Sustainability Science
  • Systems Biology
Research Article

A mesial-to-lateral dissociation for orthographic processing in the visual cortex

View ORCID ProfileFlorence Bouhali, Zoé Bézagu, Stanislas Dehaene, and Laurent Cohen
PNAS October 22, 2019 116 (43) 21936-21946; first published October 7, 2019 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1904184116
Florence Bouhali
aSorbonne Université, Inserm U 1127, CNRS UMR 7225, Institut du Cerveau et de la Moelle épinière, ICM, Hôpital de la Pitié-Salpêtrière, 75013 Paris, France;bDepartment of Psychiatry, University of California, San Francisco, CA 94143;cWeill Institute for Neurosciences, University of California, San Francisco, CA 94143;
  • Find this author on Google Scholar
  • Find this author on PubMed
  • Search for this author on this site
  • ORCID record for Florence Bouhali
  • For correspondence: florence.bouhali@gmail.com
Zoé Bézagu
aSorbonne Université, Inserm U 1127, CNRS UMR 7225, Institut du Cerveau et de la Moelle épinière, ICM, Hôpital de la Pitié-Salpêtrière, 75013 Paris, France;
  • Find this author on Google Scholar
  • Find this author on PubMed
  • Search for this author on this site
Stanislas Dehaene
dCognitive Neuroimaging Unit, INSERM, Université Paris-Sud, Université Paris-Saclay, NeuroSpin Center, Commissariat à l’Énergie Atomique et aux Énergies Alternatives DRF/I2BM, 91191 Gif/Yvette, France;eCollège de France, 75005 Paris, France;
  • Find this author on Google Scholar
  • Find this author on PubMed
  • Search for this author on this site
Laurent Cohen
aSorbonne Université, Inserm U 1127, CNRS UMR 7225, Institut du Cerveau et de la Moelle épinière, ICM, Hôpital de la Pitié-Salpêtrière, 75013 Paris, France;fAssistance Publique – Hôpitaux de Paris, Hôpital de la Pitié Salpêtrière, Féderation de Neurologie, F-75013 Paris, France
  • Find this author on Google Scholar
  • Find this author on PubMed
  • Search for this author on this site
  1. Edited by Michael I. Posner, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, and approved September 6, 2019 (received for review March 22, 2019)

  • Article
  • Figures & SI
  • Info & Metrics
  • PDF
Loading

This article requires a subscription to view the full text. If you have a subscription you may use the login form below to view the article. Access to this article can also be purchased.

Significance

The visual word form area (VWFA) is essential to reading, yet the exact representations that it harbors are unclear. We tested the hypothesis that a subregion of ventral visual cortex may be specialized for the perception of multiletter graphemes such as “ch” or “ou.” Indeed, the selective disruption of graphemic information impaired reading behavior and modulated brain activity in a mesial region around the midfusiform sulcus. In contrast, the VWFA was modulated by lexical variables. Those findings suggest a medial-to-lateral division of labor within the ventral occipitotemporal cortex. The existence of a “grapheme area,” its functional dissociation from the VWFA, and their collaboration bear important implications for the understanding of reading acquisition and of interindividual differences in reading skills.

Abstract

Efficient reading requires a fast conversion of the written word to both phonological and semantic codes. We tested the hypothesis that, within the left occipitotemporal cortical regions involved in visual word recognition, distinct subregions harbor slightly different orthographic codes adapted to those 2 functions. While the lexico-semantic pathway may operate on letter or open-bigram information, the phonological pathway requires the identification of multiletter graphemes such as “ch” or “ou” in order to map them onto phonemes. To evaluate the existence of a specific stage of graphemic encoding, 20 adults performed lexical decision and naming tasks on words and pseudowords during functional MRI. Graphemic encoding was facilitated or disrupted by coloring and spacing the letters either congruently with multiletter graphemes (ch-ai-r) or incongruently with them (c-ha-ir). This manipulation affected behavior, primarily during the naming of pseudowords, and modulated brain activity in the left midfusiform sulcus, at a site medial to the classical visual word form area (VWFA). This putative grapheme-related area (GRA) differed from the VWFA in being preferentially connected functionally to dorsal parietal areas involved in letter-by-letter reading, while the VWFA showed effects of lexicality and spelling-to-sound regularity. Our results suggest a partial dissociation within left occipitotemporal cortex: the midfusiform GRA would encode orthographic information at a sublexical graphemic level, while the lateral occipitotemporal VWFA would contribute primarily to direct lexico-semantic access.

  • reading
  • grapheme processing
  • visual word form area
  • complex graphemes

Footnotes

  • ↵1To whom correspondence may be addressed. Email: florence.bouhali{at}gmail.com.
  • Author contributions: F.B., Z.B., S.D., and L.C. designed research; F.B. and Z.B. performed research; F.B. and Z.B. analyzed data; and F.B., Z.B., S.D., and L.C. wrote the paper.

  • The authors declare no competing interest.

  • This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.

  • Data deposition: Raw anonymized data from this study are available in BIDS format on OpenNeuro, https://openneuro.org/datasets/ds002155.

  • This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1904184116/-/DCSupplemental.

Published under the PNAS license.

View Full Text

Log in using your username and password

Forgot your user name or password?

Purchase access

You may purchase access to this article. This will require you to create an account if you don't already have one.

Subscribers, for more details, please visit our Subscriptions FAQ.

Please click here to log into the PNAS submission website.

PreviousNext
Back to top
Article Alerts
Email Article

Thank you for your interest in spreading the word on PNAS.

NOTE: We only request your email address so that the person you are recommending the page to knows that you wanted them to see it, and that it is not junk mail. We do not capture any email address.

Enter multiple addresses on separate lines or separate them with commas.
A mesial-to-lateral dissociation for orthographic processing in the visual cortex
(Your Name) has sent you a message from PNAS
(Your Name) thought you would like to see the PNAS web site.
Citation Tools
A mesial-to-lateral dissociation for orthographic processing in the visual cortex
Florence Bouhali, Zoé Bézagu, Stanislas Dehaene, Laurent Cohen
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Oct 2019, 116 (43) 21936-21946; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1904184116

Citation Manager Formats

  • BibTeX
  • Bookends
  • EasyBib
  • EndNote (tagged)
  • EndNote 8 (xml)
  • Medlars
  • Mendeley
  • Papers
  • RefWorks Tagged
  • Ref Manager
  • RIS
  • Zotero
Request Permissions
Share
A mesial-to-lateral dissociation for orthographic processing in the visual cortex
Florence Bouhali, Zoé Bézagu, Stanislas Dehaene, Laurent Cohen
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Oct 2019, 116 (43) 21936-21946; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1904184116
del.icio.us logo Digg logo Reddit logo Twitter logo CiteULike logo Facebook logo Google logo Mendeley logo
  • Tweet Widget
  • Facebook Like
  • Mendeley logo Mendeley
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: 116 (43)
Table of Contents

Submit

Sign up for Article Alerts

Article Classifications

  • Biological Sciences
  • Psychological and Cognitive Sciences

Jump to section

  • Article
    • Abstract
    • Results
    • Discussion
    • Materials and Methods
    • Acknowledgments
    • Footnotes
    • References
  • Figures & SI
  • Info & Metrics
  • PDF

You May Also be Interested in

Efforts are underway to exploit a strategy that could generate fusion with relative ease. Image credit: Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.
News Feature: Small-scale fusion tackles energy, space applications
Efforts are underway to exploit a strategy that could generate fusion with relative ease.
Image credit: Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.
A deep-learning algorithm could potentially improve diagnosis and classification of neurological abnormalities. Image courtesy of Weicheng Kuo, Christian Hӓne, Pratik Mukherjee, Jitendra Malik, and Esther Lim Yuh
Brain hemorrhage detection by artificial neural network
A deep-learning algorithm could potentially improve diagnosis and classification of neurological abnormalities.
Image courtesy of Weicheng Kuo, Christian Hӓne, Pratik Mukherjee, Jitendra Malik, and Esther L. Yuh.
A study finds a shift in onset of El Niño events from eastern to western Pacific and increased frequency of extreme El Niño events since the late 1970s. Image courtesy of NOAA National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS).
Changing El Niño properties
A study finds a shift in onset of El Niño events from eastern to western Pacific and increased frequency of extreme El Niño events since the late 1970s.
Image courtesy of NOAA National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS).
A study explores how various types of food affect both human health and the environment. Image courtesy of Pixabay/esigie.
Environmental and health impacts of food
A study explores how various types of food affect both human health and the environment.
Image courtesy of Pixabay/esigie.
Profile of NAS member and molecular biologist Mary Lou Guerinot. Image courtesy of Olga Zhaxybayeva (Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH).
Featured Profile
Profile of NAS member and molecular biologist Mary Lou Guerinot
Image courtesy of Olga Zhaxybayeva (Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH).

Similar Articles

Site Logo
Powered by HighWire
  • Submit Manuscript
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • RSS Feeds
  • Email Alerts

Articles

  • Current Issue
  • Latest Articles
  • Archive

PNAS Portals

  • Classics
  • Front Matter
  • Teaching Resources
  • Anthropology
  • Chemistry
  • Physics
  • Sustainability Science

Information

  • Authors
  • Editorial Board
  • Reviewers
  • Press
  • Site Map
  • PNAS Updates

Feedback    Privacy/Legal

Copyright © 2020 National Academy of Sciences. Online ISSN 1091-6490