, 2001). This knowledge is used in performing tasks such as determining the meaning or pronunciation of a word from print. Reading aloud has been widely studied because of its importance in early reading (Wagner & Torgesen, 1987) and because performance is often impaired in developmental dyslexia and in many types of neuropathology (Coslett, 2000, Gabrieli, 2009 and Price and Mechelli, 2005). The types of computations that underlie reading aloud and their neural instantiations have been the focus of extensive research (Schlaggar & McCandliss, Inhibitor Library 2007). Writing systems afford two ways to pronounce words from print (Fig. 1A). Pronunciations (phonology)
can be computed directly (green arrow in Fig. 1A) from the written code (orthography);
however, readers can also compute the meaning of a word from its spelling, and then use meaning to generate a pronunciation (red arrows in Fig. 1A), as occurs in the related domain of spoken language production (Levelt, Roelofs, & Meyer, 1999). Evidence for these mechanisms derives from several types of research, including developmental studies of learning to read (the orthography–phonology pathway develops more rapidly than the semantic pathway; Harm & Seidenberg, 1999), studies of brain-injured patients for whom one or the other pathway is more impaired (Coslett, 2000), studies in which reliance on a given pathway is changed via manipulations of instructions Epacadostat in vitro or stimulus materials (Hino and Lupker, 2000 and Kinoshita et al., 2004), and neuroimaging Casein kinase 1 studies (Fiez et al., 1999 and Jobard et al., 2003). Whether skilled readers differ in the use of these two pathways is uncertain, however. The possibility has been discussed since a classic study by Baron and Strawson (1976) examining “Chinese” (visual) vs. “Phoenician” (phonological) subtypes of readers. However, it has been difficult to obtain clear evidence for the existence of these subtypes among skilled readers of English ( Brown et al., 1994, Yap et al., 2012 and Yap et al., 2012). Many individual differences in reading aloud (e.g., in the magnitude
of frequency and spelling-sound consistency effects) may arise from differences in reading proficiency, experience, and speed rather than distinct reading styles or strategies ( Seidenberg, 1985). Here we consider potential strategy differences not in terms of overt, deliberative strategy, but rather as implicit differences in reading style that develop over a lifetime of reading. The present study examined differences among skilled readers by addressing two questions: (1) do skilled readers differ in the extent to which semantic information is used in reading aloud, and (2) are such differences associated with neuroanatomical variability within the reading network? Regarding the first question, reading aloud does not demand access to word meaning, and in dual-route models of the task (Coltheart et al.