Despite decades of cognitive, neuropsychological and neuroimaging studies, it is unclear ifletters are identified before word-form encoding during reading, or if letters and their combinations are encoded simultaneously and interactively. Here using functional magneticresonance imaging, we show that a ‘letter-form’ area (responding more to consonant stringsthan false fonts) can be distinguished from an immediately anterior ‘visual word-form area’ inventral occipito-temporal cortex (responding more to words than consonant strings). Letterselective magnetoencephalographic responses begin in the letter-form area -60 ms earlierthan word-selective responses in the word-form area. Local field potentials confirm thelatency and location of letter-selective responses. This area shows increased high-gammapower for B400 ms, and strong phase-locking with more anterior areas supporting lexicosemantic processing. These findings suggest that during reading, visual stimuli are firstencoded as letters before their combinations are encoded as words. Activity then rapidlyspreads anteriorly, and the entire network is engaged in sustained integrative processing.
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