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- Title
Motor representations underlie the reading of unfamiliar letter combinations.
- Authors
Taitz, Alan; Assaneo, M. Florencia; Shalom, Diego E.; Trevisan, Marcos A.
- Abstract
Silent reading is a cognitive operation that produces verbal content with no vocal output. One relevant question is the extent to which this verbal content is processed as overt speech in the brain. To address this, we acquired sound, eye trajectories and lips' dynamics during the reading of consonant-consonant-vowel (CCV) combinations which are infrequent in the language. We found that the duration of the first fixations on the CCVs during silent reading correlate with the duration of the transitions between consonants when the CCVs are actually uttered. With the aid of an articulatory model of the vocal system, we show that transitions measure the articulatory effort required to produce the CCVs. This means that first fixations during silent reading are lengthened when the CCVs require a greater laryngeal and/or articulatory effort to be pronounced. Our results support that a speech motor code is used for the recognition of infrequent text strings during silent reading.
- Subjects
SILENT reading; CONSONANTS; VOWELS; MOTOR ability; LARYNGEALS (Phonetics)
- Publication
Scientific Reports, 2020, Vol 10, Issue 1, p1
- ISSN
2045-2322
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1038/s41598-020-59199-6