Abstract
Letter production is a perceptual-motor activity that creates visual experiences with the practiced letters. Past research has focused on the importance of the motor production component of writing by hand, with less emphasis placed on the potential importance of the visual percepts that are created. We sought to better understand how different visual percepts that result from letter production are processed at different levels of literacy experience. During fMRI, three groups of participants, younger children, older children, and adults, ranging in age from 4.5 to 22 years old, were presented with dynamic and static re-presentations of their own handwritten letters, static presentations of an age-matched control’s handwritten letters, and typeface letters. In younger children, we found that only the ventral-temporal cortex was recruited, and only for handwritten forms. The response in the older children also included only the ventral-temporal cortex but was associated with both handwritten and typed letter forms. The response in the adults was more distributed than in the children and responded to all types of letter forms. Thus, the youngest children processed exemplars, but not letter categories in the VTC, while older children and adults generalized their processing to many letter forms. Our results demonstrate the differences in the neural systems that support letter perception at different levels of experience and suggest that the perception of handwritten forms is an important component of how letter production contributes to developmental changes in brain processing