Abstract
Visual word recognition involves mappings among orthographic, phonological, and semantic codes. In alphabetic languages, it is hard to disentangle the effects of these codes, because orthographically well-formed words are typically pronounceable, confounding orthographic and phonological processes, and orthographic cues to meaning are rare, and where they occur are morphological, confounding orthographic and semantic processes. In Chinese character recognition, it is possible to explore orthography to phonology (O-P) and orthography to semantics (O-S) processes independently by taking advantage of the distinct phonetic and semantic components in Chinese phonograms. We analyzed data from an fMRI experiment using lexical decision for Chinese characters to explore the sensitivity of areas associated with character recognition to orthographic, phonological, and semantic processing. First, a correlation approach was used to identify regions associated with reaction time, frequency, consistency and visual complexity. Then, these ROIs were examined for their responses to stimuli with different types of information available. These results revealed two neural pathways, one for O-S processing relying on left middle temporal gyrus and angular gyrus, and the other for O-P processing relying on inferior frontal gyrus and insula. The two neural routes form a shared neural network both for real and pseudo-characters, and their cooperative division of labor reflects the neural basis for processing different types of characters. Results are broadly consistent with findings from alphabetic languages, as predicted by reading models that assume the same general architecture for logographic and alphabetic scripts.
Highlights
Visual word recognition involves mappings among orthographic, phonological, and semantic codes
In the literature of fMRI studies of word reading from alphabetic languages, a small amount of neural evidence has showed the interaction between the neural routes of orthography-to-phonology (O-P) and orthography-to-semantics (O-S) processing
The shared regions for two types of stimuli are largely consistent with the previous contrast of task vs. rest in numerous studies of Chinese character recognition (Peng et al, 2004; Liu et al, 2007; Wang et al, 2011) and meta-analysis (Bolger et al, 2005; Tan et al, 2005; Wu et al, 2012)
Summary
Visual word recognition involves mappings among orthographic, phonological, and semantic codes. Reading aloud is thought as the cooperative division of labor between orthography-tophonology and orthography-to-semantics processes (Harm and Seidenberg, 2004; Carreiras et al, 2014). The connectivity from ITS to pSTG changed as a function of word properties, in which the connectivity emerged for high- compared to low-imageability words, and for low-consistency words under certain conditions
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