Abstract
Brain activation studies of orthographic stimuli typically start with
the premise that different types of orthographic strings (e.g., words,
pseudowords) differ from each other in discrete ways, which should
be reflected in separate and distinct areas of brain activation.
The present study starts from a different premise: Words, pseudowords,
letterstrings, and false fonts vary systematically across a continuous
dimension of familiarity to English readers. Using a one-back matching
task to force encoding of the stimuli, the four types of stimuli
were visually presented to healthy adult subjects while fMRI activations
were obtained. Data analysis focused on parametric comparisons of
fMRI activation sites. We did not find any region that was exclusively
activated for real words. Rather, differences among these string
types were mainly expressed as graded changes in the balance of activations
among the regions. Our results suggest that there is a widespread
network of brain regions that form a common network for the processing
of all orthographic string types.
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