1 Major Category: Biological Sciences Minor Category: Psychology The role of the posterior fusiform gyrus in reading

Total character count: 44,877 06/04/2005 2 Studies of skilled reading, its acquisition in children, and its impairment in patients with pure alexia, all highlight the importance of the left posterior fusiform cortex in visual word recognition. Its precise functional contribution, however, remains unclear. We used visual masked priming and fMRI to elucidate the specific functional contribution of this region to reading and found that: i) unlike words, repetition of pseudowords (“hith-hith”) did not produce a neural priming effect in this region, ii) orthographically related words such as “corner-corn ” did produce a neural priming effect, but iii) this orthographic priming effect was reduced when prime-target pairs were semantically related (“teacher-teach”). We argue that these findings conflict with the notion that visual word forms are stored in this region and instead propose that the posterior fusiform cortex acts as an interface between visual form information and higher-order properties of the stimulus such as its associated sound and meaning. Importantly, this function is not specific to reading but is also engaged when processing any meaningful visual stimulus