Brain sections showing whole-brain activations across all subjects for the A) Reading > Others (SC +SP) contrast, B) SC > Others (Reading + SP) contrast, C) SP > Others (Reading + SC) contrast.

D) Brain sections showing the same three contrasts using an inclusive whole-thalamus mask (green = Reading > Others, red = SC > Others, blue = SP > Others). All brain sections presented here are in MNI space. The statistical threshold was set to p < 0.001 voxel-extent, FWE-corrected < .05 at the cluster level.

ROI analysis.

Scaled percentage signal change for bilateral LGN, MGN and VLN first-order relay thalamic nuclei as a function of sensorimotor Modality: Reading, SC and SP. Error bars represent the standard error mean. *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01, ***p < 0.001.

A. ROI analysis. Scaled percentage signal change for the LGN (in green), MGN (in red), and VLN (in blue) first-order relay thalamic nuclei as a function of Hemisphere and Stimuli. Error bars represent the standard error mean. *p < 0.05. B. Classification analysis. Histograms showing distributions of 10,000 permutation scores for the left and right hemisphere. Dashed vertical lines indicate real classification scores. Dotted vertical lines show empirical chance levels derived from permutation means. P-values indicate the proportion of permutations that exceeded the real classification performance. C. Lateralization of classification. Histograms showing distributions of classification score difference between left and right (Left - Right scores) from 10,000 permutations. Red dashed lines indicate real lateralization differences. Blue dotted lines show empirical chance levels (mean of permutation differences). P-values are two-tailed tests indicating whether observed lateralization differs significantly from chance-level asymmetry.

Functional connectivity analysis of three first-order relay thalamic pathways in A) linguistic and B) non-linguistic tasks for each of the corresponding modalities.

Lines with an arrow represent the connection of the first-order thalamic relay nuclei with the cortical primary sensorimotor regions. Thalamic nuclei, cortical regions and the lines are colored as a function of sensorimotor modality: green indicates visual modality, red indicates auditory modality and blue indicates motor modality. The values along the arrow lines are the Fisher’s-transformed z values. All the reported z values are significant against zero with p < 0.001 after Bonferroni FWE correction for multiple comparisons.