The ventral anterior temporal lobe has a necessary role in exception word reading

Ueno, T., Meteyard, L., Hoffman, P. and Murayama, K. (2018) The ventral anterior temporal lobe has a necessary role in exception word reading. Cerebral Cortex, 28 (8). pp. 3035-3045. ISSN 1460-2199 doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhy131

Abstract/Summary

An influential account of reading holds that words with exceptional spelling-to-sound correspondences (e.g., PINT) are read via activation of their lexical-semantic representations, supported by the anterior temporal lobe (ATL). This account has been inconclusive because it is based on neuropsychological evidence, in which lesion-deficit relationships are difficult to localize precisely, and functional neuroimaging data, which is spatially precise but cannot demonstrate whether the ATL activity is necessary for exception word reading. To address these issues, we used a technique with good spatial specificity - repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) - to demonstrate a necessary role of ATL in exception word reading. Following rTMS to left ventral ATL, healthy Japanese adults made more regularization errors in reading Japanese exception words. We successfully simulated these results in a computational model in which exception word reading was underpinned by semantic activations. The ATL is critically and selectively involved in reading exception words.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/77022
Identification Number/DOI	10.1093/cercor/bhy131
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Interdisciplinary Research Centres (IDRCs) > Centre for Integrative Neuroscience and Neurodynamics (CINN) Life Sciences > School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences > Neuroscience Life Sciences > School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences > Department of Clinical Language Sciences Life Sciences > School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences > Language and Cognition
Publisher	Oxford University Press
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