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      The neural code for written words: a proposal.

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          Abstract

          How is reading, a cultural invention, coded by neural populations in the human brain? The neural code for written words must be abstract, because we can recognize words regardless of their location, font and size. Yet it must also be exquisitely sensitive to letter identity and letter order. Most existing coding schemes are insufficiently invariant or incompatible with the constraints of the visual system. We propose a tentative neuronal model according to which part of the occipito-temporal 'what' pathway is tuned to writing and forms a hierarchy of local combination detectors sensitive to increasingly larger fragments of words. Our proposal can explain why the detection of 'open bigrams' (ordered pairs of letters) constitutes an important stage in visual word recognition.

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          Author and article information

          Journal
          Trends Cogn Sci
          Trends in cognitive sciences
          Elsevier BV
          1364-6613
          1364-6613
          Jul 2005
          : 9
          : 7
          Affiliations
          [1 ] INSERM unit 562, Cognitive Neuroimaging, Service Hospitalier Frederic Joliot, CEA/DRM/DSV 4 Place du General Leclerc, 91401 Orsay cedex, France. dehaene@shfj.cea.fr
          Article
          S1364-6613(05)00143-9
          10.1016/j.tics.2005.05.004
          15951224
          bf2a0ac9-ec02-4d54-b723-ed1e7d4b3fce
          History

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