Cerpelloni, F.; Van Audenhaege, A.; Matuszewski, J.; Gau, R.; Battal, C.; Falagiarda, F.; Op de Beeck, H.; Collignon, O.

Shape features are crucial for reading. Here we investigate the effect of expertise in reading visual Braille, a script developed for touch that does not share the typical explicit shape information of other alphabets. We compared visual Braille readers and a naive control group and found that individually localized visual word form area VWFA) was selectively activated for visual Braille when compared to scrambled Braille, but only in expert Braille readers. Multivariate analyses showed that linguistic properties can be decoded from Latin in both groups and from Braille in expert readers. Yet, cross-script generalization failed to reveal common representations across Latin and Braille scripts in experts, suggesting script-specific orthographic representations. Primary visual cortex, shape-selective areas (LO), and linguistic areas (l-PosTemp) showed similar multivariate profiles to VWFA, but with cross-script generalization in left Posterior Temporal area only. We conclude that the linguistic properties of a visual script, rather than low-level line-junctions properties, play a major role in how the visual system, and VWFA in particular, processes scripts.