Cognitive and Neural Substrates of Written Language: Comprehension and Production

Written language is an important domain of investigation in cognitive neuroscience because reading and spelling are uniquely human cognitive tasks that are increasingly important in society. Furthermore, examining the extent to which reading and writing depend on the same cognitive processes and representations allows exploration of the relationship between comprehension and production or, more generally perception and action. Two sources of evidence regarding shared versus independent cognitive mechanisms in reading and spelling are reviewed: neurologically impaired subjects performance on various written language tasks and neuroanatomical substrates of reading and spelling revealed by lesion studies and functional imaging. This review leads to the conclusion that reading and spelling have in common at least some underlying cognitive processes and representations, involving specific left frontal, temporal, and parietal regions.