Abstract
Functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to explore the neural correlates of semantic judgments in a group of 8- to 15-year-old Chinese children. Participants were asked to indicate if pairs of Chinese characters presented visually were related in meaning. The related pairs were arranged in a continuous variable according to association strength. Pairs of characters with weaker semantic association elicited greater activation in the mid ventral region (BA 45) of left inferior frontal gyrus, suggesting increased demands on the process of selecting appropriate semantic features. By contrast, characters with stronger semantic association elicited greater activation in left inferior parietal lobule (BA 39), suggesting stronger integration of highly related features. In addition, there was a developmental increase, similar to previously reported findings in English, in left posterior middle temporal gyrus (BA 21), suggesting that older children have more elaborated semantic representations. There were additional age-related increases in the posterior region of left inferior parietal lobule and in the ventral regions of left inferior frontal gyrus, suggesting that reading acquisition relies more on the mapping from orthography to semantics in Chinese children as compared to previously reported findings in English.
Highlights
Language is acquired without much effort and is associated with maturational changes in the brain (Friederici, 2006)
This paper focuses on the developmental changes in the neural substrate for semantic processing in reading, which may be somewhat different than spoken language
The current study examined the neural substrate of developmental changes during semantic processing in Chinese children (8-to 15-year olds)
Summary
Language is acquired without much effort and is associated with maturational changes in the brain (Friederici, 2006). This paper focuses on the developmental changes in the neural substrate for semantic processing in reading, which may be somewhat different than spoken language. Emerging evidence of the neural correlates of semantic development mainly comes from English and other alphabetic languages. This paper uses a semantic association task to explore the age effects on the neural correlates of semantic processing in a logographic language, Chinese. The semantic association task has been used to understand the functional architecture of word recognition, identifying brain regions for semantic processing in English in left inferior frontal gyrus (BA 45, 47), left posterior middle temporal gyrus (BA 21), and left inferior parietal lobule (BA 39, 40) in adults (Fletcher et al, 2000; Booth et al, 2002) and in children (Chou et al, 2006a,b)
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