Modulation of brain regions involved in word recognition by homophonous stimuli: an fMRI study

We used rapid event-related fMRI to explore factors modulating the activation of orthographic and phonological representations of print during a visual lexical decision task. Stimuli included homophonous word and nonword stimuli (MAID, BRANE), which have been shown behaviorally to produce longer response times due to phonological mediation effects. We also manipulated participants' reliance on orthography by varying the extent to which nonword foils were orthographically typical (wordlike context) or atypical (non-wordlike context) of real words. Key findings showed that reading low-frequency homophones in the wordlike context produced activation in regions associated with phonological processing (i.e., opercular region of the left inferior frontal gyrus [IFG; BA 44]), the integration of orthography and phonology (i.e., the inferior parietal lobule (IPL), and lexicosemantic processing (i.e., left middle temporal gyrus, [MTG]). Pseudohomophones in the wordlike context produced greater activity relative to other nonword trials in regions engaged during both phonological processing (i.e., left IFG/precentral gyrus; BA 6/9]), and semantic processing (triangular region of the left IFG; BA 47). Homophonous effects in the non-wordlike context were primarily isolated to medial extrastriate regions, hypothesized to be involved in low level visual processing and not reading-related processing per se. These findings demonstrate that the degree to which phonological and orthographic representations of print are activated depends not only on homophony, but also on the word-likeness of nonword stimuli. Implications for models of visual word recognition are discussed.