Title
Modality- and task-specific brain regions involved in Chinese lexical processing.
Abstract
fMRI was used to examine lexical processing in native adult Chinese speakers. A 2 task (semantics and phonology) x 2 modality (visual and auditory) within-subject design was adopted. The semantic task involved a meaning association judgment and the phonological task involved a rhyming judgment to two sequentially presented words. The overall effect across tasks and modalities was used to identify seven ROIs, including the left fusiform gyrus (FG), the left superior temporal gyrus (STG), the left ventral inferior frontal gyrus (VIFG), the left middle temporal gyrus (MTG), the left dorsal inferior frontal gyrus (DIFG), the left inferior parietal lobule (IPL), and the left middle frontal gyrus (MFG). ROI analyses revealed two modality-specific areas, FG for visual and STG for auditory, and three task-specific areas, IPL and DIFG for phonology and VIFG for semantics. Greater DIFG activation was associated with conflicting tonal information between words for the auditory rhyming task, suggesting this region's role in strategic phonological processing, and greater VIFG activation was correlated with lower association between words for both the auditory and the visual meaning task, suggesting this region's role in retrieval and selection of semantic representations. The modality- and task-specific effects in Chinese revealed by this study are similar to those found in alphabetical languages. Unlike English, we found that MFG was both modality- and task-specific, suggesting that MFG may be responsible for the visuospatial analysis of Chinese characters and orthography-to-phonology integration at a syllabic level.
Year
DOI
Venue
2009
10.1162/jocn.2009.21141
J. Cognitive Neuroscience
Keywords
Field
DocType
dorsal inferior frontal gyrus,chinese lexical processing,left middle frontal gyrus,left middle temporal gyrus,modality-and task-specific brain region,left inferior parietal lobule,left fusiform gyrus,visual meaning task,semantic task,left superior temporal gyrus,phonological task,ventral inferior frontal gyrus
Brain mapping,Chinese characters,Syllabic verse,Dorsum,Psychology,Cognitive psychology,Phonology,Inferior frontal gyrus,Left fusiform gyrus,Semantics
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
21
8
0898-929X
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
6
0.53
10
Authors
13
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Li Liu160.53
Xiaoxiang Deng260.53
Danling Peng3253.84
Fan Cao4111.67
Guosheng Ding5284.50
Zhen Jin691.31
Yawei Zeng760.53
Ke Li860.53
Lei Zhu960.53
Ning Fan1060.53
Yuan Deng112511.91
Donald J. Bolger12242.05
James R Booth1313115.77