Florence Bouhali was awarded a 2022 ILCB post-doc fellowship to work with Johannes Ziegler (LPC) and Chotiga Pattamadilok (LPL), in collaboration with Fumiko Hoeft (UConn/UCSF). Her project will address the variability in the reading brain network across languages, individuals and contexts, to clarify how the size of orthographic units used for reading (from single letters to whole words) contributes to this variability. Florence aims at establishing orthographic grain size as a general organizing principle across scales.
Florence’s research focuses on the neural correlates of reading, with a special interest in the visual regions processing letters and words, at the interface with language. During her PhD with Laurent Cohen (Paris Brain Institute / ICM) and her post-doctorate with Fumiko Hoeft (UCSF), she explored the neural fine-tuning for orthographic processing of these regions in adults, and the typical and atypical development of this functional specialization in children with and without dyslexia. Florence’s work also contributed to revealing some of the neural structural constraints that may apply to reading acquisition. Studying the neural correlates of a cultural learning such as reading can help us understand the incredible plasticity of the human brain and its organizing principles.