400 research outputs found

    Writing Affects the Brain Network of Reading in Chinese: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study

    Get PDF
    We examined the hypothesis that learning to write Chinese characters influences the brain’s reading network for characters. Students from a college Chinese class learned 30 characters in a character-writing condition and 30 characters in a pinyin-writing condition. After learning, functional magnetic resonance imaging collected during passive viewing showed different networks for reading Chinese characters and English words, suggesting accommodation to the demands of the new writing system through short-term learning. Beyond these expected differences, we found specific effects of character writing in greater activation (relative to pinyin writing) in bilateral superior parietal lobules and bilateral lingual gyri in both a lexical decision and an implicit writing task. These findings suggest that character writing establishes a higher quality representation of the visual–spatial structure of the character and its orthography. We found a greater involvement of bilateral sensori-motor cortex (SMC) for character-writing trained characters than pinyin-writing trained characters in the lexical decision task, suggesting that learning by doing invokes greater interaction with sensori-motor information during character recognition. Furthermore, we found a correlation of recognition accuracy with activation in right superior parietal lobule, right lingual gyrus, and left SMC, suggesting that these areas support the facilitative effect character writing has on reading. Finally, consistent with previous behavioral studies, we found character-writing training facilitates connections with semantics by producing greater activation in bilateral middle temporal gyri,whereas pinyin-writing training facilitates connections with phonology by producing greater activation in right inferior frontal gyrus

    Cultural Constraints on Brain Development: Evidence from a Developmental Study of Visual Word Processing in Mandarin Chinese

    Get PDF
    Developmental differences in phonological and orthographic processing in Chinese were examined in 9 year olds, 11 year olds, and adults using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Rhyming and spelling judgments were made to 2-character words presented sequentially in the visual modality. The spelling task showed greater activation than the rhyming task in right superior parietal lobule and right inferior temporal gyrus, and there were developmental increases across tasks bilaterally in these regions in addition to bilateral occipital cortex, suggesting increased involvement over age on visuo-orthographic analysis. The rhyming task showed greater activation than the spelling task in left superior temporal gyrus and there were developmental decreases across tasks in this region, suggesting reduced involvement over age on phonological representations. The rhyming and spelling tasks included words with conflicting orthographic and phonological information (i.e., rhyming words spelled differently or nonrhyming words spelled similarly) or nonconflicting information. There was a developmental increase in the difference between conflicting and nonconflicting words in left inferior parietal lobule, suggesting greater engagement of systems for mapping between orthographic and phonological representations. Finally, there were developmental increases across tasks in an anterior (Broadman area [BA] 45, 46) and posterior (BA 9) left inferior frontal gyrus, suggesting greater reliance on controlled retrieval and selection of posterior lexical representations

    Die Verarbeitung von Eigennamen im Mandarin-Chinesischen : eine Verhaltens- und Neuroimaging-Studie

    Get PDF
    Yen H-L. Processing of proper names in Mandarin Chinese : a behavioral and neuroimaging study. Bielefeld (Germany): Bielefeld University; 2006.Proper names have been considered as a universal language class (Bright, 2003; Müller 2004). The distinction between proper names and common nouns has been postulated since several thousand years in ancient Greek and in Chinese philosophy of language (e.g., Kripke, 1972; Wu, 1997). Furthermore, this dissociation has been supported by experimental data (e.g., Müller & Kutas, 1996) and case studies (e.g., Lyons, 2002). This dissertation explores the processing of proper names in Mandarin Chinese in which the morphology of proper names and the tradition of name giving differ greatly from Indo-European languages such as German and English. It aims to figure out whether the theoretically based dissociation has a neurocognitive reality. Besides a behavior study (category decision task), we carried out an auditory and a visual functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment. Forty native speakers of Mandarin Chinese took part in the behavior study whereas twelve different participants participated the fMRI study. For both modalities, forty personal names, forty geographical names and forty common nouns were used as experimental stimuli. Different words were applied in the auditory and the visual experiment. The behavior study tested 20 brand names in addition. In general, Mandarin Chinese speakers of the present study were able to recognize proper names as type (here: personal names and geographical names) significantly faster than common nouns in both auditory and visual modality. In contrast, brand names did not exhibit the faster reaction time than common nouns. The reaction time of brand names was significantly longer than personal names and geographical names. In our fMRI study, processing of proper names and processing of common nouns revealed partially different brain activation patterns. Contrasts between personal names and common nouns as well as contrasts between geographical names and common nouns revealed significant activation. In auditory modality, proper names revealed more activation in bilateral anterior temporal cortices, premotor area and anterior precuneus. In visual modality, proper names evoked significant activation in the frontal lobe including frontal eye fields and premotor area. Despite of modality, common nouns yielded significant activation in the left posterior temporal cortex. Further characteristic of processing of common nouns was activation in occipital area and temporo-parietal junction. Our fMRI findings support the view that processing of proper names and common nouns involve different brain areas. This may due to the difference between general semantic processing and identity-specific semantic processing. Moreover, the corresponding cognitive mechanism of proper name processing may differ from common nouns. The present finding in Mandarin Chinese is also supported by previous research of Indo-European languages. Corresponding to the hypothesis which has been discussed in the philosophy of language over two thousand years, the special status of proper names can be supported by our neurocognitive evidence

    White-matter structure in the right hemisphere predicts Mandarin Chinese learning success

    Get PDF
    AbstractSecond language learning becomes increasingly difficult with age, but some adults learn more successfully than others. We examined whether inter-subject variability in the microstructure of white matter pathways, as measured by diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), would predict native English speakers' outcomes in learning Mandarin Chinese. Twenty-one adults were scanned before participating in an intensive 4-week Mandarin course. At the end of the Mandarin course, participants completed a final exam that assessed their skills in both spoken and written Mandarin. Individual participants' white-matter tracts were reconstructed from their native DTI data and related to final-exam performance. Superior language learning was correlated with DTI measures in the right hemisphere, but not in the left hemisphere. In particular, greater initial fractional anisotropy (FA) in both the right superior longitudinal fasciculus (parietal bundle) and the right inferior longitudinal fasciculus was associated with more successful Mandarin learning. The relation between white-matter structure in the right hemisphere of native English speakers and successful initial language learning may reflect the tonal and visuo-spatial properties, respectively, of spoken and written Mandarin Chinese

    The Development of Orthographic Knowledge: A Cognitive Neuroscience Investigation of Reading Skill

    Get PDF
    This investigation compared the effects of explicit letter-sound training to holistic word training on the development of word recognition in a novel orthography paradigm. In a between-subjects design, participants were trained to read spoken English words printed in the alphabet script of Korean Hangul. Training took place over four separate sessions with assessment measures conducted throughout. Compared to the holistic training, the component training condition resulted in significantly better transfer to novel word forms and retention of previously learned items. Furthermore, compared to component training, holistic training yielded greater sensitivity to frequency. Variability in the holistically trained condition revealed bimodal distribution of performance: a high and low performing subset. Functional MRI measured cortical responses to the training conditions. Imaging results revealed generally greater responses in the "reading network" overall for the explicit component-based training compared to holistic training, in particular, regions of the inferior and superior parietal gyri as well as the left precentral gyrus. In a comparison of readers within the holistic group, we found that readers who implicitly derived the sublexical patterns in the writing system activated more of the reading network than those who did not sufficiently acquire this knowledge. This latter group primarily activated ventral visual regions. We conclude that explicit training of sublexical components leads to optimal word recognition performance in alphabetic writing systems due to the redundant mechanisms of decoding and specific word form knowledge

    Intersecting distributed networks support convergent linguistic functioning across different languages in bilinguals

    Get PDF
    How bilingual brains accomplish the processing of more than one language has been widely investigated by neuroimaging studies. The assimilation-accommodation hypothesis holds that both the same brain neural networks supporting the native language and additional new neural networks are utilized to implement second language processing. However, whether and how this hypothesis applies at the finer-grained levels of both brain anatomical organization and linguistic functions remains unknown. To address this issue, we scanned Chinese-English bilinguals during an implicit reading task involving Chinese words, English words and Chinese pinyin. We observed broad brain cortical regions wherein interdigitated distributed neural populations supported the same cognitive components of different languages. Although spatially separate, regions including the opercular and triangular parts of the inferior frontal gyrus, temporal pole, superior and middle temporal gyrus, precentral gyrus and supplementary motor areas were found to perform the same linguistic functions across languages, indicating regional-level functional assimilation supported by voxel-wise anatomical accommodation. Taken together, the findings not only verify the functional independence of neural representations of different languages, but show co-representation organization of both languages in most language regions, revealing linguistic-feature specific accommodation and assimilation between first and second languages

    Neural Correlates of Orthographic Access in Mandarin Chinese Writing: An fMRI Study of the Word-Frequency Effect

    Get PDF
    Writing is an essential tool for human communication and involves multiple linguistic, cognitive, and motor processes. Chinese, a logographic writing system, differs remarkably from the writing systems of alphabetic languages. The neural substrates of Chinese writing are largely unknown. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in a copying task, this study probed the neural underpinnings of orthographic access during Mandarin Chinese writing by employing the word-frequency effect. The results showed that writing low-frequency characters evoked greater activation in the bilateral superior/middle/inferior frontal gyrus, superior/inferior parietal lobule, and fusiform gyrus than writing high-frequency characters. Moreover, psychophysiological interaction (PPI) analysis demonstrated that the word-frequency effect modulated functional connectivity within the frontal-occipital networks and the parietal-occipital networks. Together, these findings illustrate the neural correlates of orthographic access for Mandarin Chinese writing, shedding new light on the cognitive architecture of writing across various writing systems

    Neuroanatomical representation of language in English- Chinese bilingual biscriptals: An FMRI study

    Get PDF
    Master'sMASTER OF SOCIAL SCIENCE
    corecore