This finding, reported at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, Neuroscience 2011, matters because unraveling how the brain solves the complex task of reading can help in uncovering the brain basis of reading disorders, such as dyslexia<\/strong>, say the scientists.<\/p>\n \u00e2\u20ac\u0153One camp of neuroscientists believes that we access both the phonology and the visual perception of a word as we read them and that the area or areas of the brain that do one, also do the other, but our study proves this isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t the case,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d says the study\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s lead investigator, Laurie Glezer, Ph.D., a postdoctoral research fellow. She works in the Laboratory for Computational Cognitive Neuroscience at GUMC, led by Maximilian Riesenhuber, Ph.D., who is a co-author.<\/p>\n \u00e2\u20ac\u0153What we found is that once we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve learned a word, it is placed in a purely visual dictionary in the brain. Having a purely visual representation allows for the fast and efficient word recognition we see in skilled readers,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d she says. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153This study is the first demonstration of that concept.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n Glezer says that these findings might help explain why people with dyslexia have slower, more labored reading. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153It could be that in dyslexia, because of phonological processing problems, these individuals are not ever able to develop a finely tuned visual representation of the words they have encountered before,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d she says. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153They can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t take advantage of the fast processing of words using this dictionary.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n Glezer and her co-authors tested word recognition in 12 volunteers using fMRI. They were able to see that words that are different, but sound the same, like \u00e2\u20ac\u0153hare\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153hair\u00e2\u20ac\u009d activate different neurons, akin to accessing different entries in a dictionary\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s catalogue. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153If the sounds of the word had influence in this part of the brain we would expect to see that they activate the same or similar neurons, but this was not the case, \u00e2\u20ac\u02dchair\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 and \u00e2\u20ac\u02dchare\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 looked just as different as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153hair\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153soup\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. This suggests that all we use is the visual information of a word and not the sounds.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n \u00e2\u20ac\u0153When we see a word for the first time, it requires some time to read and sound it out, but after perhaps just one presentation of the word, you can recognize it without sounding it out<\/strong>,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d she says. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153This occurs because our brain first uses phonology to encode the word and match the sound with the written word. Once we do that and encounter the word a few more times, we no longer need the phonology at first, just the visual input to identify the word.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n \u00e2\u20ac\u0153We hope these findings will serve as a foundation to examine reading disorders,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Glezer says. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153For example, if people with dyslexia have a problem forming this visual dictionary, it may be that there could be ways of helping train children with dyslexia to form a more finely tuned visual dictionary.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the Georgetown University press release: Skilled readers can recognize words at lightning fast speed when they read because the word has been placed in a visual dictionary of sorts,… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4,6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=82"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":83,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82\/revisions\/83"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=82"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=82"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/images\/blogpics\/Brain.jpg\" "\\"brain\\"")
Skilled readers can recognize words at lightning fast speed when they read because the word has been placed in a visual dictionary of sorts<\/strong>, say Georgetown University Medical Center (GUMC) neuroscientists. The visual dictionary idea rebuts the theory that our brain \u00e2\u20ac\u0153sounds out\u00e2\u20ac\u009d words each time we see them.<\/p>\n