Moore Michelle W, Brendel Paul C, Fiez Julie A
Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, PO Box 6122, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV 26506, USA; Department of Communication Science and Disorders, 4028 Forbes Tower, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA.
Learning Research and Development Center, 3939 O'Hara Street, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA; Department of Neuroscience, A215 Langley Hall, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA.
Brain Lang. 2014 Feb;129:7-13. doi: 10.1016/j.bandl.2013.11.005. Epub 2014 Jan 24.
Skilled visual word recognition is thought to rely upon a particular region within the left fusiform gyrus, the visual word form area (VWFA). We investigated whether an individual (AA1) with pure alexia resulting from acquired damage to the VWFA territory could learn an alphabetic "FaceFont" orthography, in which faces rather than typical letter-like units are used to represent phonemes. FaceFont was designed to distinguish between perceptual versus phonological influences on the VWFA. AA1 was unable to learn more than five face-phoneme mappings, performing well below that of controls. AA1 succeeded, however, in learning and using a proto-syllabary comprising 15 face-syllable mappings. These results suggest that the VWFA provides a "linguistic bridge" into left hemisphere speech and language regions, irrespective of the perceptual characteristics of a written language. They also suggest that some individuals may be able to acquire a non-alphabetic writing system more readily than an alphabetic writing system.
熟练的视觉单词识别被认为依赖于左梭状回内的一个特定区域,即视觉单词形式区(VWFA)。我们研究了一名因VWFA区域后天受损而患有纯失读症的个体(AA1)是否能够学习一种字母“FaceFont”拼字法,在这种拼字法中,用面部而不是典型的字母样单位来表示音素。FaceFont旨在区分对VWFA的感知影响和语音影响。AA1学习的面部-音素映射不超过五个,表现远低于对照组。然而,AA1成功地学习并使用了一种由15个面部-音节映射组成的原始音节文字。这些结果表明,VWFA提供了一条通向左半球言语和语言区域的“语言桥梁”,而与书面语言的感知特征无关。它们还表明,一些个体可能更容易习得非字母书写系统而非字母书写系统。