Quinn, C. . 1, 2 , Taylor, J. S. H. . 3 & Davis, M. H. . 1
1 (1) MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge, UK
2 (2) Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
3 (3) Department of Psychology, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey, UK
Offline consolidation has been suggested as a mechanism to avoid 'catastrophic interference' between new and old knowledge when learning arbitrary mappings. Systematic mappings, by contrast, may not show the same interference effects (French, 1999; McLelland et al., 1995). Taylor et al. (2014) taught participants to read new words written in unfamiliar symbols and to name novel objects during fMRI scanning. Words, unlike object-names, contain systematic spelling-sound mappings, e.g. ?cat? and ?cap? share both letters and sounds. We extend this research with a train-twice, scan-once imaging design (Davis et al., 2009) to explore the effect of overnight consolidation on learning systematic spelling-sound mappings and arbitrary object-name mappings. Written words and objects learned on day 1 but not day 2 should be consolidated at the time of scanning. Imaging results replicate and extend previous findings with parietal regions showing additional activation for reading a novel orthography and fusiform regions showing additional activation during naming of novel objects. Participants showed accurate generalisation of systematic spelling-sound correspondences in reading untrained words, this was associated with increased activity in left inferior frontal regions. The effect of consolidation on the neural activity for novel words/objects is explored using functional ROIs for reading/naming familiar words and objects.