Many Neighbors Are Not Silent. FMRI Evidence for Global Lexical Activity in Visual Word Recognition

Overview

Journal Front Hum Neurosci

Specialty Neurology

Date 2015 Aug 11

PMID 26257634

Citations 8

Authors

Mario Braun

Arthur M Jacobs

Fabio Richlan

Stefan Hawelka

Florian Hutzler

Martin Kronbichler

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Many neurocognitive studies investigated the neural correlates of visual word recognition, some of which manipulated the orthographic neighborhood density of words and nonwords believed to influence the activation of orthographically similar representations in a hypothetical mental lexicon. Previous neuroimaging research failed to find evidence for such global lexical activity associated with neighborhood density. Rather, effects were interpreted to reflect semantic or domain general processing. The present fMRI study revealed effects of lexicality, orthographic neighborhood density and a lexicality by orthographic neighborhood density interaction in a silent reading task. For the first time we found greater activity for words and nonwords with a high number of neighbors. We propose that this activity in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex reflects activation of orthographically similar codes in verbal working memory thus providing evidence for global lexical activity as the basis of the neighborhood density effect. The interaction of lexicality by neighborhood density in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex showed lower activity in response to words with a high number compared to nonwords with a high number of neighbors. In the light of these results the facilitatory effect for words and inhibitory effect for nonwords with many neighbors observed in previous studies can be understood as being due to the operation of a fast-guess mechanism for words and a temporal deadline mechanism for nonwords as predicted by models of visual word recognition. Furthermore, we propose that the lexicality effect with higher activity for words compared to nonwords in inferior parietal and middle temporal cortex reflects the operation of an identification mechanism based on local lexico-semantic activity.

Citing Articles

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Neural correlates of affective contributions to lexical decisions in children and adults.

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A model-guided dissociation between subcortical and cortical contributions to word recognition.

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From sublexical facilitation to lexical competition: ERP effects of masked neighbor priming.

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Neurofunctionally dissecting the reading system in children.

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