The Ventral Anterior Temporal Lobe has a Necessary Role in Exception Word Reading.

Taiji Ueno,Kou Murayama,Lotte Meteyard,Paul Hoffman

doi:10.1093/cercor/bhy131

Abstract

An influential account of reading holds that words with exceptional spelling-to-sound correspondences (e.g., PINT) are read via activation of their lexical-semantic representations, supported by the anterior temporal lobe (ATL). This account has been inconclusive because it is based on neuropsychological evidence, in which lesion-deficit relationships are difficult to localize precisely, and functional neuroimaging data, which is spatially precise but cannot demonstrate whether the ATL activity is necessary for exception word reading. To address these issues, we used a technique with good spatial specificity—repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS)—to demonstrate a necessary role of ATL in exception word reading. Following rTMS to left ventral ATL, healthy Japanese adults made more regularization errors in reading Japanese exception words. We successfully simulated these results in a computational model in which exception word reading was underpinned by semantic activations. The ATL is critically and selectively involved in reading exception words.

Highlights

Since seminal work by Poljak (Poljak 1926) argued for dual pathways (i.e., 2 mechanisms) for the central auditory system, various cognitive functions have been linked with a dual-pathway neural framework
We used a technique with good spatial specificity —repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation—to demonstrate a necessary role of anterior temporal lobe (ATL) in exception word reading
Past reading theories have assumed the role of lexicalsemantic representations in reading exception/atypical words, and neuropsychological and neuroimaging literature points to a role for the left ATL for this cognitive processing

Summary

Introduction

Since seminal work by Poljak (Poljak 1926) argued for dual pathways (i.e., 2 mechanisms) for the central auditory system, various cognitive functions have been linked with a dual-pathway neural framework (e.g., vision, motor, attention). Pioneering work(Marshall and Newcombe 1973) in the 1970s explicitly stated the necessity of 2 mechanisms in reading: sublexical processing, which relies on the statistical relationships (or “rules”) between letter(s) and sounds, and whole-word processing, which computes pronunciations from item-specific information (e.g., lexical-semantic knowledge). Reading a word with a regular or typical spellingto-sound correspondence (e.g., MINT) can rely on the statistical relationships between the sensory information (letters) and the sound/motor information involved in its pronunciation. Reading a word with an exceptional/atypical spelling-to-sound correspondence (e.g., PINT) cannot rely solely on the spelling-to-sound statistical

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Conclusion