van Atteveldt Nienke, Formisano Elia, Goebel Rainer, Blomert Leo
Faculty of Psychology, Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Maastricht, P.O. Box 616, 6200 MD, The Netherlands.
Neuron. 2004 Jul 22;43(2):271-82. doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2004.06.025.
Most people acquire literacy skills with remarkable ease, even though the human brain is not evolutionarily adapted to this relatively new cultural phenomenon. Associations between letters and speech sounds form the basis of reading in alphabetic scripts. We investigated the functional neuroanatomy of the integration of letters and speech sounds using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Letters and speech sounds were presented unimodally and bimodally in congruent or incongruent combinations. Analysis of single-subject data and group data aligned on the basis of individual cortical anatomy revealed that letters and speech sounds are integrated in heteromodal superior temporal cortex. Interestingly, responses to speech sounds in a modality-specific region of the early auditory cortex were modified by simultaneously presented letters. These results suggest that efficient processing of culturally defined associations between letters and speech sounds relies on neural mechanisms similar to those naturally evolved for integrating audiovisual speech.
大多数人能极其轻松地掌握读写技能，尽管人类大脑在进化过程中并未适应这种相对较新的文化现象。字母与语音之间的关联构成了字母文字阅读的基础。我们使用功能磁共振成像（fMRI）研究了字母与语音整合的功能神经解剖学。字母和语音以单模态和双模态呈现，组合方式为一致或不一致。基于个体皮质解剖结构对齐的单受试者数据和组数据的分析表明，字母和语音在异模态颞上叶皮质中整合。有趣的是，早期听觉皮质中特定模态区域对语音的反应会因同时呈现的字母而改变。这些结果表明，对字母和语音之间文化定义关联的有效处理依赖于与自然进化出的整合视听语音的神经机制相似的神经机制。
