摘要：Reading and writing are relatively recent human developments, and the neural basis for these abilities has been asource of inquiry and controversy. In previous studies, reading has been associated with both left ventral temporalzones (the so-called “ visual word form area” ) as well as more dorsal zones, primarily left parietal cortex (Price &Mechelli, 2005). Writing has also been associated with left parietal cortex but also with left sensorimotor cortex andprefrontal regions (Menon & Desmond, 2001). In the current study, we investigated the neural basis of both readingand writing on a voxel-by-voxel basis in a large patient sample using voxel-based lesion symptom mapping (VLSM).VLSM provides a statistical analysis of the role of distinct brain regions, both grey and white matter, in a particularbehavior by comparing performance of patients with and without a lesion at eveiy voxel. We predicted that certainbrain regions, such as left parietal cortex, would be common to both reading and writing, while other regions, such asposterior ventral temporal cortex, would be specific to reading alone.
