Mo Ce, Yu Mengxia, Seger Carol, Mo Lei
Peking-Tsinghua Center for Life Sciences, Peking University, Beijing 100871, PR China; Academy for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies, Peking University, Beijing 100871, PR China.
Center for Studies of Psychological Application, South China Normal University, Guangzhou 510631, China.
Brain Lang. 2015 Feb;141:28-34. doi: 10.1016/j.bandl.2014.11.008. Epub 2014 Dec 18.
How are Chinese characters recognized and represented in the brain of skilled readers? Functional MRI fast adaptation technique was used to address this question. We found that neural adaptation effects were limited to identical characters in bilateral ventral visual system while no activation reduction was observed for partially overlapping characters regardless of the spatial location of the shared sub-character components, suggesting highly selective neuronal tuning to whole characters. The consistent neural profile across the entire ventral visual cortex indicates that Chinese characters are represented as mutually distinctive wholes rather than combinations of sub-character components, which presents a salient contrast to the left-lateralized, simple-to-complex neural representations of alphabetic words. Our findings thus revealed the cultural modulation effect on both local neuronal activity patterns and functional anatomical regions associated with written symbol recognition. Moreover, the cross-language discrepancy in written symbol recognition mechanism might stem from the language-specific early-stage learning experience.
熟练阅读者大脑中汉字是如何被识别和表征的？为解决这个问题，我们采用了功能磁共振成像快速适应技术。我们发现，神经适应效应仅限于双侧腹侧视觉系统中的相同汉字，而对于部分重叠的汉字，无论共享子部件的空间位置如何，均未观察到激活减少，这表明神经元对整个汉字具有高度选择性的调谐。整个腹侧视觉皮层一致的神经特征表明，汉字是以相互独特的整体形式来表征的，而不是子部件的组合，这与字母文字在左侧化、从简单到复杂的神经表征形成了显著对比。因此，我们的研究结果揭示了文化对与书面符号识别相关的局部神经元活动模式和功能解剖区域的调节作用。此外，书面符号识别机制中的跨语言差异可能源于特定语言的早期学习经历。
