The left ventral occipitotemporal cortex (vOT) is important in visual word recognition. Studies have shown that the left vOT is generally observed to be involved in spoken language processing in skilled readers, suggesting automatic access to corresponding orthographic information. However, little is known about where and how the left vOT is involved in the spoken language processing of young children with emerging reading ability. In order to answer this question, we examined the relation of reading ability in 5–6-year-old kindergarteners to the activation of vOT during an auditory phonological awareness task. Two experimental conditions: onset word pairs that shared the first phoneme and rhyme word pairs that shared the final biphone/triphone, were compared to allow a measurement of vOT’s activation to small (i.e., onsets) and large grain sizes (i.e., rhymes). We found that higher reading ability was associated with better accuracy of the onset, but not the rhyme, condition. In addition, higher reading ability was only associated with greater sensitivity in the posterior left vOT for the contrast of the onset versus rhyme condition. These results suggest that acquisition of reading results in greater specialization of the posterior vOT to smaller rather than larger grain sizes in young children.

左腹枕颞皮（vOT）在视觉单词识别中很重要。研究表明，在熟练的读者中，通常观察到左vOT参与了口头语言处理，这表明可以自动访问相应的拼字信息。但是，关于左vOT在何处以及如何参与具有新兴阅读能力的幼儿的口语处理的了解甚少。为了回答这个问题，我们在听觉语音意识任务中检查了5-6岁幼儿园儿童的阅读能力与vOT激活的关系。比较了两个实验条件：共享第一个音素的起始词对和共享最终的双音素/三音素的押韵词对，以便将vOT的激活程度测量为较小（即，起病）和大颗粒（如押韵）。我们发现，较高的阅读能力与较好的发作准确度相关，而与押韵状况无关。此外，较高的阅读能力仅与左后后方vOT对发作与韵律状况的对比具有更高的敏感性有关。这些结果表明，阅读的获得导致后代vOT的专业化程度更高，从而使年幼儿童的晶粒更小而不是更大。