Just ran across this article from Scientific American. Those familiar with Trout and Ries' "The Eye Vs. The Ear" and, more recently, Roy Williams' "Wizard of Ads" trilogy, will recognize the implications. Good article to send to advertising prospects about the superiority of speech to print.
Broca's area responded to silent reading much in the same way auditory neurons respond to text spoken aloud—as if Broca's area was generating the sound of the words so the readers heard them internally. The finding speaks to a debate about whether words are encoded in the brain by a neural pattern symbolic of their meaning or if they are encoded via simpler attributes, such as how they sound. The results add to mounting evidence that words are fundamentally processed and catalogued by their basic sounds and shapes.
