Department of Psychology, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan.
Dev Cogn Neurosci. 2011 Jul;1(3):338-50. doi: 10.1016/j.dcn.2011.01.005.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to examine the neural correlates of semantic judgments to Chinese words in a group of 10-15 year old Chinese children. Two semantic tasks were used: visual-visual versus visual-auditory presentation. The first word was visually presented (i.e. character) and the second word was either visually or auditorily presented, and the participant had to determine if these two words were related in meaning. Different from English, Chinese has many homophones in which each spoken word corresponds to many characters. The visual-auditory task, therefore, required greater engagement of cognitive control for the participants to select a semantically appropriate answer for the second homophonic word. Weaker association pairs produced greater activation in the mid-ventral region of left inferior frontal gyrus (BA 45) for both tasks. However, this effect was stronger for the visual-auditory task than for the visual-visual task and this difference was stronger for older compared to younger children. The findings suggest greater involvement of semantic selection mechanisms in the cross-modal task requiring the access of the appropriate meaning of homophonic spoken words, especially for older children.
功能性磁共振成像（fMRI）被用于研究一组 10-15 岁中国儿童对中文单词进行语义判断的神经相关性。使用了两个语义任务：视觉-视觉与视觉-听觉呈现。第一个单词以视觉形式呈现（即字符），第二个单词以视觉或听觉形式呈现，参与者必须确定这两个单词在语义上是否相关。与英语不同，中文有许多同音字，每个发音的单词对应许多字符。因此，对于参与者来说，视觉-听觉任务需要更多的认知控制才能为第二个同音字选择一个语义上合适的答案。对于两个任务，较弱的联想对在左额下回中部（BA45）产生更大的激活。然而，对于视觉-听觉任务，这种效应比视觉-视觉任务更强，对于年龄较大的儿童比年龄较小的儿童更强。研究结果表明，在需要获取同音口语单词的适当含义的跨模态任务中，语义选择机制的参与程度更高，尤其是对于年龄较大的儿童。
