Models of speech production posit a role for the motor system, predominantly the posterior inferior frontal gyrus, in encoding complex phonological representations for speech production, at the phonemic, syllable, and word levels [Roelofs, A. A dorsal-pathway account of aphasic language production: The WEAVER++/ARC model. Cortex, 59(Suppl. C), 33–48, 2014; Hickok, G. Computational neuroanatomy of speech production. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 13, 135–145, 2012; Guenther, F. H. Cortical interactions underlying the production of speech sounds. Journal of Communication Disorders, 39, 350–365, 2006]. However, phonological theory posits subphonemic units of representation, namely phonological features [Chomsky, N., & Halle, M. The sound pattern of English , 1968; Jakobson, R., Fant, G., & Halle, M. Preliminaries to speech analysis. The distinctive features and their correlates . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1951], that specify independent articulatory parameters of speech sounds, such as place and manner of articulation. Therefore, motor brain systems may also incorporate phonological features into speech production planning units. Here, we add support for such a role with an fMRI experiment of word sequence production using a phonemic similarity manipulation. We adapted and modified the experimental paradigm of Oppenheim and Dell [Oppenheim, G. M., & Dell, G. S. Inner speech slips exhibit lexical bias, but not the phonemic similarity effect. Cognition, 106, 528–537, 2008; Oppenheim, G. M., & Dell, G. S. Motor movement matters: The flexible abstractness of inner speech. Memory & Cognition, 38, 1147–1160, 2010]. Participants silently articulated words cued by sequential visual presentation that varied in degree of phonological feature overlap in consonant onset position: high overlap (two shared phonological features; e.g., /r/ and /l/) or low overlap (one shared phonological feature, e.g., /r/ and /b/). We found a significant repetition suppression effect in the left posterior inferior frontal gyrus, with increased activation for phonologically dissimilar words compared with similar words. These results suggest that phonemes, particularly phonological features, are part of the planning units of the motor speech system.

Prior lesion and functional imaging studies have highlighted the importance of the left ventral occipito-temporal (LvOT) cortex for visual word recognition. Within this area, there is a posterior–anterior hierarchy of subregions that are specialized for different stages of orthographic processing. The aim of the present fMRI study was to dissociate the effects of subword orthographic typicality (e.g., cider [high] vs. cynic [low]) from the effect of lexicality (e.g., pollen [word] vs. pillen [pseudoword]). We therefore orthogonally manipulated the orthographic typicality of written words and pseudowords (nonwords and pseudohomophones) in a visual lexical decision task. Consistent with previous studies, we identified greater activation for pseudowords than words (i.e., an effect of lexicality) in posterior LvOT cortex. In addition, we revealed higher activation for atypical than typical strings, irrespective of lexicality, in a left inferior occipital region that is posterior to LvOT cortex. When lexical decisions were made more difficult in the context of pseudohomophone foils, left anterior temporal activation also increased for atypical relative to typical strings. The latter finding agrees with the behavior of patients with progressive anterior temporal lobe degeneration, who have particular difficulty recognizing words with atypical orthography. The most novel outcome of this study is that, within a distributed network of regions supporting orthographic processing, we have identified a left inferior occipital region that is particularly sensitive to the typicality of subword orthographic patterns.