College of Information Science and Technology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, 100875, China.
National Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning & IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, 100875, China.
Sci Rep. 2018 Feb 14;8(1):3047. doi: 10.1038/s41598-018-21062-0.
Access to semantic information of visual word forms is a key component of reading comprehension. In this study, we examined the involvement of the visual word form area (VWFA) in this process by investigating whether and how the activity patterns of the VWFA are influenced by semantic information during semantic tasks. We asked participants to perform two semantic tasks - taxonomic or thematic categorization - on visual words while obtaining the blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) fMRI responses to each word. Representational similarity analysis with four types of semantic relations (taxonomic, thematic, subjective semantic rating and word2vec) revealed that neural activity patterns of the VWFA were associated with taxonomic information only in the taxonomic task, with thematic information only in the thematic task and with the composite semantic information measured by word2vec in both semantic tasks. Furthermore, the semantic information in the VWFA cannot be explained by confounding factors including orthographic, low-level visual and phonological information. These findings provide positive evidence for the presence of both orthographic and task-relevant semantic information in the VWFA and have significant implications for the neurobiological basis of reading.
视觉词形的语义信息获取是阅读理解的关键组成部分。在这项研究中，我们通过考察 VWFA 的活动模式是否以及如何受到语义任务中语义信息的影响，来研究 VWFA 在这个过程中的参与情况。我们要求参与者在进行视觉词的语义任务（分类或主题分类）时，同时获取每个词的血氧水平依赖（BOLD）fMRI 反应。使用四种语义关系（分类、主题、主观语义评分和 word2vec）进行的代表性相似性分析表明，仅在分类任务中，VWFA 的神经活动模式与分类信息相关，仅在主题任务中与主题信息相关，在两个语义任务中与 word2vec 测量的综合语义信息相关。此外，VWFA 中的语义信息不能用包括正字法、低水平视觉和语音信息在内的混杂因素来解释。这些发现为 VWFA 中存在正字法和与任务相关的语义信息提供了积极证据，对阅读的神经生物学基础具有重要意义。
