Abstract
Resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) offers a novel approach to reveal the temporal synchronization of functionally related brain regions. Recent studies have identified several RSFCs whose strength was associated with reading competence in alphabetic languages. In the present study, we examined the role of intrinsic functional relations for reading a non-alphabetic language – Chinese – by correlating RSFC maps of nine Chinese reading-related seed regions and reaction time in the single-character reading task. We found that Chinese reading efficiency was positively correlated with the connection between left inferior occipital gyrus and left superior parietal lobule, between right posterior fusiform gyrus and right superior parietal lobule, and between left inferior temporal gyrus and left inferior parietal lobule. These results could not be attributed to inter-individual differences arising from the peripheral processes of the reading task such as visual input detection and articulation. The observed RSFC-reading correlation relationships are discussed in the framework of Chinese character reading, including visuospatial analyses and semantic/phonological processes.
Highlights
Oral word reading is a learned complex cognitive skill that entails orthographic access and subsequent activation of word phonology and meaning
We focused on this study instead of other Chinese reading meta-analyses because 1) the tasks included in Bolger et al (2005) entailed a complete reading process, which corresponds to the single-character reading task in our study; 2) the English reading-related regions of interest (ROI) in adult readers in [18] were taken from Bolger et al (2005), making the English-Chinese comparison more direct
We found that the following resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) were negatively associated with reading performance: between the L.STG seed and right orbitofrontal cortex (L.STG-R.OFC, cluster-level r = 20.68, p,0.01), between the L.vIFG1 seed and right thalamus (L.vIFG1-R.THA, clusterlevel r = 20.60, p,0.001), and between the L.vIFG2 seed and bilateral precuneus (L.vIFG2-B.PCUN, cluster-level r = 20.59, p,0.001)
Summary
Oral word reading is a learned complex cognitive skill that entails orthographic access and subsequent activation of word phonology and meaning. Some regions have been reported to be consistently activated in reading Chinese but not or less in reading English: right occipitotemporal regions [4,5,6,7] and left middle frontal gyrus or the adjacent dorsal inferior frontal lobe regions ([4,5]; but see [8]). Such differences have been attributed to specific cognitive processes associated with complex visuospatial analyses of Chinese characters and with addressed phonology in the Chinese script, respectively
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