Neuronal correlates of consistency and frequency effects on Chinese character naming: an event-related fMRI study.
This event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (efMRI) study aims to investigate the central representations of Chinese orthography-to-phonology transformation (OPT) by simultaneously manipulating character frequency and consistency. Bilateral inferior frontal cortices (including Broca's area and insula), the left temporoparietal region (superior parietal gyrus and supramarginal gyrus), and the left temporal-occipital junction showed greater activation, especially in low-frequency conditions, when naming inconsistent characters as compared to consistent ones. These findings suggest that these regions are involved in the sublexical conversion of orthographic input into phonological codes in naming Chinese. The similar activation pattern found in these three regions suggests a distributed process, rather than separate neural routes, for lexical and sublexical OPT. In addition, the regions involved in Chinese OPT are congruent with the findings for reading alphabetic scripts and indicate that the neuronal mechanisms for orthography-to-phonology transformation is domain universal across different writing systems.
Lee
Chia-Ying
CY
The Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan.
Tsai
Jie-Li
JL
Kuo
Wen-Jui
WJ
Yeh
Tzu-Chen
TC
Wu
Yu-Te
YT
Ho
Low-Tone
LT
Hung
Daisy L
DL
Tzeng
Ovid J L
OJ
Hsieh
Jen-Chuen
JC
D000328:Adult; D001931:Brain Mapping; D002540:Cerebral Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D004292:Dominance, Cerebral / Q000502:physiology; D005260:Female; D005625:Frontal Lobe / Q000502:physiology; D007839:Functional Laterality / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted; D021621:Imaging, Three-Dimensional; D007802:Language; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D016571:Neural Networks, Computer; D009474:Neurons / Q000502:physiology; D010296:Parietal Lobe / Q000502:physiology; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D010700:Phonetics; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D011932:Reading; D012660:Semantics; D013223:Statistics as Topic; D013702:Temporal Lobe / Q000502:physiology; D014706:Verbal Learning / Q000502:physiology