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The neural development and organization of abstract word recognition

Discussion. As in the research investigating localization at the letter level, we succeeded in directly observing word-specific brain activations. We are thus in an ideal position to look for word-specific brain activations in dyslexics and thus to gain insight both into the causal role that this brain area plays in normal reading and into the deficits that underlie dyslexia (e.g., whether some subset of dyslexics show evidence for impaired visual processing of abstract word representations). Also, having demonstrated that six weeks of appropriate training is sufficient to produce significant behavioral results as predicted by the common contexts hypothesis, we can now test alternative hypotheses using the same methodology. For example, if abstract letter identities arise from hearing the same name associated with different visual forms (e.g., "A" and "a" have the same name), then one would predict that six weeks of training in naming characters from a novel alphabet should produce the same kind of result as discussed above.

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