Abstract
In the ventral occipito-temporal cortex reside numerous areas specialized to identify different categories of stimuli. Among them, the visual word form area (VWFA) preferentially responds to written words. What drives this selectivity for orthographic material remains debated. One popular account suggests that VWFA’s selectivity builds on the intrinsic preference this region has for low-level features shared among most orthographic systems, like specific line junctions (e.g. T, L, Y). Alternatively, the VWFA could be sensitive to any type of alphabetic material, irrespective of these specific low-level features. We present new data showing that VWFA engages in processing Braille, a script developed for touch that does not share some low-level characteristic of classical alphabets like line junctions, in expert visual readers. In a first session, we show that the region showing preferential activity for roman-based French word over control stimuli in the left ventral occipito-temporal cortex (the VWFA), also showed preferential response to Braille words over control Braille stimuli in expert visual Braille readers only. In a second session, we presented to the participants stimuli with four decreasing levels of linguistic properties: real words, pseudo-words, non-words, and a fake-script condition, for both Braille and roman-based French alphabets. Multivariate analyses carried on patterns of activity from VWFA revealed that the differences between words and word-like stimuli show a pattern of similarity within Braille stimuli that resembles the one within roman-based French. These results indicate that some typical visual features of scripts are not mandatory characteristics the activation of VWFA for linguistic material. Rather, the linguistic information itself, invariant of the script in which words were presented, seems to play an important role in determining the response of this word-selective brain area.