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Category: Project

Description: Reading involves transforming arbitrary visual symbols into sounds and meanings. This study interrogated the neural representations in ventral occipital-temporal cortex (vOT) that support this abstraction process. 24 adults learned to read two sets of 24 novel words that shared phonemes and semantic categories but were written in different artificial orthographies. Following two-weeks of training, participants read the trained words whilst neural activity was measured with fMRI. Representational similarity analysis on item-pairs from the same orthography revealed that right and more posterior vOT regions were sensitive to basic visual similarity whereas mid-anterior left vOT was sensitive to letter identity. Furthermore, representational invariance to letter position increased from posterior to anterior vOT. Further along the left vOT processing stream, item-pairs that shared sounds or meanings, but were represented by different orthographies (no visual similarity), had similar neural patterns. These results reveal a hierarchical, posterior-to-anterior gradient in vOT regions, in which representations are transformed from location-specific to location invariant, and from visual representations to representations that transmit information about the phonological and semantic attributes of printed words. This demonstrates the critical role of the vOT processing stream in abstracting linguistic information from written word forms.