ArticleScience advances2023
Does the visual word form area split in bilingual readers? A millimeter-scale 7-T fMRI study.
Article in Science advances, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 44 citations in OpenAlex.
- Culture Shapes the Neural Functional Alteration and Its Development in Children With Dyslexia: A Cross-Linguistic Meta-Analysis.Developmental science · 2026Pooled it
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- Limb-selective regions in the lateral temporal lobe shrink from childhood to adulthood.Brain structure & function · 2026Article
- From adolescence to adulthood: functional fingerprints of high-level visual cortex reveal differential development of visuospatial processing.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Lexical Representations of the Native and Second Languages During L2 Word Reading in Chinese-English Bilinguals.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2026Article
- Article
- Functional Specialization of the Visual Word Form Area During Word Reading: A Multimodal Neuroimaging Study.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2026Article
- From retinotopic to ordinal coding: Dissecting the cortical stages of visual word recognition.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- 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
- Intracerebral Electrical Stimulation of the Left Occipito-Temporal Cortex Induces Pure Alexia.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Seeing speech: Neural mechanisms of cued speech perception in prelingually deaf and hearing users.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Revealing the co-existence of written and spoken language coding neural populations in the visual word form area.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Bridging speech and sight: white matter anatomy in ticker-tape synaesthesia.Brain communications · 2025Article
- Demystifying visual word form area visual and nonvisual response properties with precision fMRI.iScience · 2024Article
- Hemispheric dominance in reading system alters contribution to face processing lateralization across development.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2024Article
- Cracking the neural code for word recognition in convolutional neural networks.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Unique longitudinal contributions of sulcal interruptions to reading acquisition in children.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Phonological properties of logographic words modulate brain activation in bilinguals: a comparative study of Chinese characters and Japanese Kanji.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2024Article
- The transition from vision to language: Distinct patterns of functional connectivity for subregions of the visual word form area.Human brain mapping · 2024Article
- Visual word processing engages a hierarchical, distributed, and bilateral cortical network.iScience · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In expert readers, a brain region known as the visual word form area (VWFA) is highly sensitive to written words, exhibiting a posterior-to-anterior gradient of increasing sensitivity to orthographic stimuli whose statistics match those of real words. Using high-resolution 7-tesla functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we ask whether, in bilingual readers, distinct cortical patches specialize for different languages. In 21 English-French bilinguals, unsmoothed 1.2-millimeters fMRI revealed that the VWFA is actually composed of several small cortical patches highly selective for reading, with a posterior-to-anterior word-similarity gradient, but with near-complete overlap between the two languages. In 10 English-Chinese bilinguals, however, while most word-specific patches exhibited similar reading specificity and word-similarity gradients for reading in Chinese and English, additional patches responded specifically to Chinese writing and, unexpectedly, to faces. Our results show that the acquisition of multiple writing systems can indeed tune the visual cortex differently in bilinguals, sometimes leading to the emergence of cortical patches specialized for a single language.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.