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Research Article

Universal brain systems for recognizing word shapes and handwriting gestures during reading

Kimihiro Nakamura, Wen-Jui Kuo, Felipe Pegado, Laurent Cohen, Ovid J. L. Tzeng, and Stanislas Dehaene
PNAS first published November 26, 2012 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1217749109
Kimihiro Nakamura
aCognitive Neuroimaging Unit, Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (INSERM), F91191 Gif-sur-Yvette, France;bNeuroSpin Center, Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique (CEA), Institut Fédératif de Recherche (IFR) 49, F91191 Gif-sur-Yvette, France;cUniversité Paris XI, 91405 Orsay, France;dCollège de France, 75231 Paris, France;
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Wen-Jui Kuo
eNational Yang-Ming University, Taipei 11221, Taiwan;
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Felipe Pegado
aCognitive Neuroimaging Unit, Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (INSERM), F91191 Gif-sur-Yvette, France;bNeuroSpin Center, Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique (CEA), Institut Fédératif de Recherche (IFR) 49, F91191 Gif-sur-Yvette, France;cUniversité Paris XI, 91405 Orsay, France;dCollège de France, 75231 Paris, France;
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Laurent Cohen
fFaculté de Médecine Pitié-Salpêtrière, Université Paris VI, 75651 Paris, France;gDepartment of Neurology, Groupe Hospitalier Pitié-Salpêtrière, Assistance Publique–Hôpitaux de Paris (AP-HP), 75651 Paris, France;hInstitut du Cerveau et de la Moelle épinière (ICM) Research Center, INSERM, Unité Mixte de Recherche Sciences 975, 75651 Paris, France;
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Ovid J. L. Tzeng
iAcademia Sinica, Taipei 11574, Taiwan; andjBrain Research Center, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taipei 30010, Taiwan
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Stanislas Dehaene
aCognitive Neuroimaging Unit, Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (INSERM), F91191 Gif-sur-Yvette, France;bNeuroSpin Center, Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique (CEA), Institut Fédératif de Recherche (IFR) 49, F91191 Gif-sur-Yvette, France;cUniversité Paris XI, 91405 Orsay, France;dCollège de France, 75231 Paris, France;
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  • For correspondence: stanislas.dehaene@cea.fr
  1. Contributed by Stanislas Dehaene, October 19, 2012 (sent for review April 16, 2012)

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Abstract

Do the neural circuits for reading vary across culture? Reading of visually complex writing systems such as Chinese has been proposed to rely on areas outside the classical left-hemisphere network for alphabetic reading. Here, however, we show that, once potential confounds in cross-cultural comparisons are controlled for by presenting handwritten stimuli to both Chinese and French readers, the underlying network for visual word recognition may be more universal than previously suspected. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging in a semantic task with words written in cursive font, we demonstrate that two universal circuits, a shape recognition system (reading by eye) and a gesture recognition system (reading by hand), are similarly activated and show identical patterns of activation and repetition priming in the two language groups. These activations cover most of the brain regions previously associated with culture-specific tuning. Our results point to an extended reading network that invariably comprises the occipitotemporal visual word-form system, which is sensitive to well-formed static letter strings, and a distinct left premotor region, Exner’s area, which is sensitive to the forward or backward direction with which cursive letters are dynamically presented. These findings suggest that cultural effects in reading merely modulate a fixed set of invariant macroscopic brain circuits, depending on surface features of orthographies.

  • cross-cultural invariance
  • functional magnetic resonance imaging
  • neuronal recycling
  • masked priming

Footnotes

  • ↵1To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: stanislas.dehaene{at}cea.fr.
  • Author contributions: K.N., W.-J.K., L.C., and S.D. designed research; K.N., W.-J.K., and F.P. performed research; K.N., W.-J.K., F.P., O.J.L.T., and S.D. analyzed data; and K.N. and S.D. wrote the paper.

  • The authors declare no conflict of interest.

  • This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1217749109/-/DCSupplemental.

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Reading by eye and reading by hand
Kimihiro Nakamura, Wen-Jui Kuo, Felipe Pegado, Laurent Cohen, Ovid J. L. Tzeng, Stanislas Dehaene
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Nov 2012, 201217749; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1217749109

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Reading by eye and reading by hand
Kimihiro Nakamura, Wen-Jui Kuo, Felipe Pegado, Laurent Cohen, Ovid J. L. Tzeng, Stanislas Dehaene
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Nov 2012, 201217749; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1217749109
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