Mapping the intersection of language and reading: the neural bases of the primary systems hypothesis

Abstract

The primary systems framework has been used to relate behavioural performance across many different language activities to the status of core underpinning domain-general cognitive systems. This study provided the first quantitative investigation of this account at both behavioural and neural levels in a group of patients with chronic post-stroke aphasia. Principal components analysis was used to distil orthogonal measures of phonological and semantic processing, which were then related to reading performance and the underlying lesion distributions using voxel-based correlational methodology. Concrete word reading involved both a ventral semantic pathway, and inferior and anterior aspects of the dorsal phonological pathway. Abstract word reading overlapped with the ventral semantic pathway but also drew more extensively on the superior and posterior aspects of the dorsal phonological pathway. Nonword reading was related to phonological processing along the dorsal pathway and was also supported by a more superior set of regions previously associated with speech motor output. The use of continuous measures of behavioural performance and neural integrity allowed us to elucidate for the first time both the lesion and behavioural correlates for the semantic and phonological components of the primary systems hypothesis and to extend these by identifying the importance of an additional dorsal speech motor output system. These results provide a target for future neuroanatomically constrained computational models of reading.

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