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A multimodal language region in the ventral visual pathway

Nature volume 394, pages 274–277 (1998)Cite this article

Abstract

Reading words and naming pictures involves the association of visual stimuli with phonological and semantic knowledge. Damage to a region of the brain in the left basal posterior temporal lobe (BA37), which is strategically situated between the visual cortex and the more anterior temporal cortex, leads to reading and naming deficits1,2. Additional evidence implicating this region in linguistic processing comes from functional neuroimaging studies of reading in normal subjects3,4,5,6,7 and subjects with developmental dyslexia8,9. Here we test whether the visual component of reading is essential for activation of BA37 by comparing cortical activations elicited by word processing in congenitally blind, late-blind and sighted subjects using functional neuroimaging. Despite the different modalities used (visual and tactile), all groups of subjects showed a common activation of BA37 by words relative to non-word letter-strings. These findings agree with the proposal that BA37 is an association area that integrates converging inputs from many regions10. Our study confirms a prediction of theories of brain function that depend on convergence zones; the absence of one input (that is, visual) does not alter the response properties of such a convergence region.

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Figure 1: Word-specific activations (responses to words minus responses to consonant letter-strings) in sighted, late-blind and congenitally blind subjects.
Figure 2: Demonstration of the anterior/posterior dissociation between word-specific and nonspecific cortical activations on ventral views of the brain surface (excluding the cerebelum).

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Acknowledgements

The authors are supported by the Wellcome Trust. We thank A. Brennan, A. Carrol, G. Lewington, J. Galliers and S. Grootoonk for their help with data collection, R. Frackowiak, J. Coull and A. Kleinschmidt for an internal review of this manuscript, and M. Rötger for discussions. We are indebted to our subjects, especially the blind subjects and the Royal National Institute for the Blind in the UK.

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  1. The Wellcome Department of Cognitive Neurology, Institute of Neurology, Queen Square, WC1N 3BG, London, UK

    Christian Büchel, Cathy Price & Karl Friston

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  1. Christian Büchel
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Correspondence to Christian Büchel.

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Büchel, C., Price, C. & Friston, K. A multimodal language region in the ventral visual pathway. Nature 394, 274–277 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/28389

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