WVU Language and Literacy Lab

Work done in collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh is now published in eNeuro. We trained adults to read an alphabet that uses houses as letters and examined their brain activity before and after the training.

The VWFA Is the Home of Orthographic Learning When Houses Are Used as Letters Learning to read specializes a portion of the left mid-fusiform cortex for printed word recognition, the putative visual word form area (VWFA). This study examined whether a VWFA specialized for English is sufficiently malleable to support learning a perceptually atypical second writing system. The....

Our experiment worked and the pilot data were very informative in moving us closer to beginning our multi-site data collection. Wrapped up the final night in Oklahoma with great food and company. Thanks again, Peter, Fernanda, and Victoria!