Orthographic Research
Studies of orthographic word recognition:
We manipulate orthographic (character type, bigram frequency), phonologic (pronounceability, pronunciation consistency), lexic (lexical status, neighborhood size, word frequency, neighbor frequency) and semantic (pseudohomophone status, concreteness, word class, semantic neighborhood density, natural category) variables during lexical decision and semantic categorization tasks. The goal is to differentially modulate representational levels involved in word recognition and thereby test predictions generated by specific models of these systems.
Research Highlight
The figures below show that the activity in the left lateral fusiform gyrus is modulated by bigram frequency. This pattern of activation closely matches participants' performance on a psychophysical task with the same stimuli (from NeuroImage, 2006).
Current Funding
R01 NS33576Functional MRI of Human Brain Language Systems
Jeffrey R. Binder, M.D, Principal Investigator
