Philosophy and Social Science Laboratory of Reading and Development in Children and Adolescents, South China Normal University, Ministry of Education, Guangzhou, China.
School of Psychology, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, China.
Hum Brain Mapp. 2022 Sep;43(13):4013-4029. doi: 10.1002/hbm.25900. Epub 2022 May 12.
Previous studies have revealed that phonological processing of Chinese characters elicited activation in the left prefrontal cortex, bilateral parietal cortex, and occipitotemporal regions. However, it is controversial what role the left middle frontal gyrus plays in Chinese character reading, and whether the core regions (e.g., the left superior temporal gyrus and supramarginal gyrus) for phonological processing of alphabetic languages are also involved in Chinese character reading. To address these questions, the present study used both univariate and multivariate analysis (i.e., representational similarity analysis, RSA) to explore neural representations of phonological information during Chinese character reading. Participants were scanned while performing a reading aloud task. Univariate activation analysis revealed a widely distributed network for word reading, including the bilateral inferior frontal gyrus, middle frontal gyrus, lateral temporal cortex, and occipitotemporal cortex. More importantly, RSA showed that the left prefrontal (i.e., the left middle frontal gyrus and left inferior frontal gyrus) and bilateral occipitotemporal areas (i.e., the left inferior and middle temporal gyrus and bilateral fusiform gyrus) represented phonological information of Chinese characters. These results confirmed the importance of the left middle frontal gyrus and regions in ventral pathway in representing phonological information of Chinese characters.
先前的研究表明，汉字的语音处理会激活左前额叶皮层、双侧顶叶皮层和枕颞区域。然而，左额中回在汉字阅读中扮演什么角色，以及用于处理字母语言语音的核心区域（如左颞上回和缘上回）是否也参与汉字阅读，这两个问题仍存在争议。为了解决这些问题，本研究使用了单变量和多变量分析（即表示相似性分析，RSA）来探索汉字阅读过程中语音信息的神经表示。参与者在执行朗读任务时接受了扫描。单变量激活分析显示，单词阅读涉及广泛的网络，包括双侧额下回、额中回、外侧颞叶和枕颞叶。更重要的是，RSA 显示左前额叶（即左额中回和左额下回）和双侧枕颞区（即左颞下回和中回以及双侧梭状回）表示汉字的语音信息。这些结果证实了左额中回和腹侧通路区域在表示汉字语音信息方面的重要性。
