Chou Tai-Li, Chen Chih-Wei, Fan Li-Ying, Chen Shiou-Yuan, Booth James R
Department of Psychology, National Taiwan University Taipei, Taiwan.
Front Hum Neurosci. 2009 Nov 20;3:27. doi: 10.3389/neuro.09.027.2009. eCollection 2009.
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.
功能磁共振成像被用于探究一组8至15岁中国儿童语义判断的神经关联。参与者被要求指出视觉呈现的汉字对在意义上是否相关。相关的汉字对根据关联强度排列成一个连续变量。语义关联较弱的汉字对在左下额叶回的中腹侧区域（BA 45）引发了更大的激活，这表明在选择适当语义特征的过程中需求增加。相比之下，语义关联较强的汉字在左下顶叶小叶（BA 39）引发了更大的激活，这表明高度相关特征的整合更强。此外，与之前在英语研究中报告的结果类似，左后颞中回（BA 21）出现了与发育相关的激活增加，这表明年龄较大的儿童具有更精细的语义表征。左下顶叶小叶后部区域和左下额叶回腹侧区域也出现了与年龄相关的额外激活增加，这表明与之前在英语研究中报告的结果相比，中国儿童的阅读习得更多地依赖于从正字法到语义的映射。
