An fMRI study of Chinese character reading and picture naming by native Korean speakers.
Chinese characters appear in the currently used Korean language, and the system used for writing system the Korean language consists of a mixture of the Korean alphabet and Chinese characters. In the present study, neural mechanisms involved in reading a single Chinese character words and naming pictures by Korean native speakers were investigated using a functional magnetic resonance imaging technique. The findings show a right hemispheric dominance within the occipito-temporal and the left middle/medial frontal area for both reading Chinese characters and naming pictures. This should reflect the specific visual processing of reading Chinese characters. Additional activations in inferior frontal and cingulage gyrus were also observed. The activations of inferior parietal region and thalamus are of interest, since we assume that these activations are strongly related to the phonological status of single Chinese character words rather than two character words that are typically used by Korean native speakers.
Yoon
Hyo Woon
HW
fMRI Laboratory of Brain Science Research Center, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon, South Korea.
Chung
Jun-Young
JY
Kim
Kyung Hwan
KH
Song
Myung-Sung
MS
Park
Hyun Wook
HW
D000328:Adult; D001921:Brain / Q000098:blood supply* / Q000502:physiology; D001931:Brain Mapping; D005260:Female; D007839:Functional Laterality / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D007723:Korea; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D019303:Multilingualism; D010100:Oxygen / Q000097:blood; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D011932:Reading; D014825:Vocabulary
D010100:Oxygen