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Updated: Aug 14, 2025

Lexical Decision Task for Studying Written Word Recognition in Adults with and without Dementia or Mild Cognitive Impairment
Published on: June 25, 2019
Intact reading ability despite lacking a canonical visual word form area in an individual born without the left
Jin Li1, Hope Kean2, Evelina Fedorenko2
1Department of Psychology, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA.
Abstract:
The visual word form area (VWFA), a region canonically located within left ventral temporal cortex (VTC), is specialized for orthography in literate adults presumbly due to its connectivity with frontotemporal language regions. But is a typical, left-lateralized language network critical for the VWFA's emergence? We investigated this question in an individual (EG) born without the left superior temporal lobe but who has normal reading ability. EG showed canonical typical face-selectivity bilateraly but no wordselectivity either in right VWFA or in the spared left VWFA. Moreover, in contrast with the idea that the VWFA is simply part of the language network, no part of EG's VTC showed selectivity to higher-level linguistic processing. Interestingly, EG's VWFA showed reliable multivariate patterns that distinguished words from other categories. These results suggest that a typical left-hemisphere language network is necessary for acanonical VWFA, and that orthographic processing can otherwise be supported by a distributed neural code.
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