There are significant differences between spoken language perception and reading beyond the obvious difference of sensory input channel. We could expect that even after the effects of modality are subtracted out, listening and reading will be organized somewhat differently in the brain. My colleagues and I have used fMRI tasks to study brain function during sentence comprehension via speech and print in skilled and less-skilled readers.

Questions my talk will address:

Is there a supramodal language system that is engaged both in speech comprehension and reading?

If so, where are the brain sites of overlap and nonoverlap? How does acquisition of literacy change brain organization?

Are there individual differences in speech-print overlap that reflect the reader’s skill?

If so, do reader skill differences show up even on the maps for speech processing?