ArticleThe Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience2021
A Heteromodal Word-Meaning Binding Site in the Visual Word Form Area under Top-Down Frontoparietal Control.
Article in The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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14 citing papers in PubMed, 24 citations in OpenAlex.
- A cortical gradient in area 55b links language and somato-cognitive action networks.Research square · 2026Article
- Literacy acquisition and functional connectivity drive the emergence and continued development of the VWFA.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Evidence for hierarchical representations of written and spoken words from an open-science human neuroimaging dataset.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2026Article
- Functional Specialization of the Visual Word Form Area During Word Reading: A Multimodal Neuroimaging Study.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2026Article
- Phonological Representations of Auditory and Visual Speech in the Occipito-temporal Cortex and Beyond.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Distinct neural representations of different linguistic components following sign language learning.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Functional connectivity between the uncinate fasciculus and frontotemporal semantic system supports reading comprehension in adolescents.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Article
- Reading reshapes stimulus selectivity in the visual word form area.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Visual word processing engages a hierarchical, distributed, and bilateral cortical network.iScience · 2024Article
- A review of functional MRI application for brain research of Chinese language processing.Magnetic resonance letters · 2023Review
- Functional connectivity during orthographic, phonological, and semantic processing of Chinese characters identifies distinct visuospatial and phonosemantic networks.Human brain mapping · 2022Article
- The Brain Connectome for Chinese Reading.Neuroscience bulletin · 2022Review
- The shared neurobiological basis of developmental dyslexia and developmental stuttering: A meta-analysis of functional and structural MRI studies.International journal of clinical and health psychology : IJCHPArticle
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Authors and funding
8 authors at 5 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The integral capacity of human language together with semantic memory drives the linkage of words and their meaning, which theoretically is subject to cognitive control. However, it remains unknown whether, across different language modalities and input/output formats, there is a shared system in the human brain for word-meaning binding and how this system interacts with cognitive control. Here, we conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment based on a large cohort of subjects (50 females, 50 males) to comprehensively measure the brain responses evoked by semantic processing in spoken and written word comprehension and production tasks (listening, speaking, reading, and writing). We found that heteromodal word input and output tasks involved distributed brain regions within a frontal-parietal-temporal network and focally coactivated the anterior lateral visual word form area (VWFA), which is located in the basal occipitotemporal area. Directed connectivity analysis revealed that the VWFA was invariably under significant top-down modulation of the frontoparietal control network and interacts with regions related to attention and semantic representation. This study reveals that the VWFA is a key site subserving general semantic processes linking words and meaning, challenging the predominant emphasis on this area's specific role in reading or more general visual processes. Our findings also suggest that the dynamics between semantic memory and cognitive control mechanisms during word processing are largely independent of the modalities of input or output.
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