Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale, Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit, Gif sur Yvette, 91191 France.
Trends Cogn Sci. 2011 Jun;15(6):254-62. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2011.04.003. Epub 2011 May 16.
Reading systematically activates the left lateral occipitotemporal sulcus, at a site known as the visual word form area (VWFA). This site is reproducible across individuals/scripts, attuned to reading-specific processes, and partially selective for written strings relative to other categories such as line drawings. Lesions affecting the VWFA cause pure alexia, a selective deficit in word recognition. These findings must be reconciled with the fact that human genome evolution cannot have been influenced by such a recent and culturally variable activity as reading. Capitalizing on recent functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments, we provide strong corroborating evidence for the hypothesis that reading acquisition partially recycles a cortical territory evolved for object and face recognition, the prior properties of which influenced the form of writing systems.
阅读系统地激活左侧外侧枕颞沟，该部位被称为视觉词形区（VWFA）。这个部位在个体/文字之间具有可重复性，适应于阅读特定的过程，并且相对于其他类别（如线条图）对书面字符串具有部分选择性。影响 VWFA 的病变导致纯失读症，即单词识别的选择性缺陷。这些发现必须与这样一个事实相协调，即人类基因组的进化不可能受到阅读等如此近期和文化上多变的活动的影响。利用最近的功能磁共振成像实验，我们为阅读习得部分回收用于物体和面部识别的皮质区域的假设提供了强有力的佐证，其先前的特性影响了书写系统的形式。
