Abstract
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.
Highlights
Written production is an important form of human language involving multiple cognitive, linguistic, and perceptual-motor operations that can be broadly divided into two components: central and peripheral processes
Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the present study examined the neural underpinnings of orthographic access during actual writing of Mandarin Chinese characters
Thirty participants were included in the one-way ANOVA analysis for latency because two participants whose responses were more than three standard deviation (SD) from the mean were excluded
Summary
Written production is an important form of human language involving multiple cognitive, linguistic, and perceptual-motor operations that can be broadly divided into two components: central and peripheral processes. The former refers to the processing involved in the retrieval of orthographic codes, and the latter refers to the motor processing. Lexical agraphia is manifested as selective impairments in spelling orthographically irregular and ambiguous words, along with a relatively intact ability to spell regular words and non-words (Beauvois and Dérouesné, 1981; Rapcsak and Beeson, 2004); this form of agraphia is thought to consist of damage to the whole-word retrieval
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