Representational similarity of hemodynamic brain responses to written and spoken words increases when learning to read
Learning to read requires binding auditory and visual information together, yet how the developing brain maps information across sensory modalities remains poorly understood. To shed light on this topic we employed functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate hemodynamic brain responses during spoken and written word or pseudoword recognition in primary school children with different levels of reading experience. Audiovisual representational similarity of activation patterns in the inferior frontal gyrus, inferior parietal lobule, superior temporal gyrus, and temporo-occipital cortex, increased with school grade and this similarity was largest in the left posterior superior temporal gyrus. Our results suggest that learning to read is related to increasing neurophysiological similarity of auditory and visual word representations within canonical language areas.