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Seeing speech: The cerebral substrate of tickertape synesthesia

Reading acquisition is enabled by deep changes in the brain’s visual system and language areas, and in the links subtending their collaboration. Disruption of those plastic processes commonly results in developmental dyslexia. However, atypical development of reading mechanisms may occasionally result in ticker-tape synesthesia (TTS), a condition described by Francis Galton in 1883 wherein individuals “see mentally in print every word that is uttered (…) as from a long imaginary strip of paper”. While reading is the bottom-up translation of letters into speech, TTS may be viewed as its opposite, the top-down translation of speech into internally visualized letters. In a series of functional MRI experiments, we studied MK, a man with TTS. We showed that a set of left-hemispheric areas were more active in MK than in controls during the perception of normal than reversed speech, including frontoparietal areas involved in speech processing, and the Visual Word Form Area, an occipitotemporal region subtending orthography. Those areas were identical to those involved in reading, supporting the construal of TTS as upended reading. Using dynamic causal modeling, we further showed that, parallel to reading, TTS induced by spoken words and pseudowords relied on top-down flow of information along distinct lexical and phonological routes, involving the middle temporal and supramarginal gyri, respectively. Future studies of TTS should shed new light on the neurodevelopmental mechanisms of reading acquisition, their variability and their disorders. Significance statement Some individuals, whenever they are hearing speech, see vividly in their mind’s eye the corresponding words in written form, as mental subtitles. This unusual condition, termed ticker-tape synesthesia (TTS), far from being purely anecdotal, actually touches on the core of the brain mechanisms of normal and impaired reading acquisition. Through 3 fMRI experiments, plus brain connectivity analyses, we propose an in-depth study of a single individual with such ticker-tape synesthesia. We propose that TTS, a situation in some sense symmetrical to developmental dyslexia, reflects an inverted flow of information through the reading system, such that speech is automatically translated into internally visualized letters. Future studies of TTS should shed new light on the neurodevelopmental mechanisms of reading acquisition.