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.

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IntroductionExisting behavioral and neuroimaging studies revealed inter-individual variability in the selection of the two phonological routes in word reading. However, it is not clear how individuals’ preferred reading pathways/strategies modulate the involvement of a certain brain region for phonological learning in a new language, and consequently affect their behavioral performance on phonological access.MethodsTo address this question, the present study recruited a group of native Chinese speakers to learn two sets of artificial language characters, respectively, in addressed-phonology training (i.e., whole-word mapping) and assembled-phonology training conditions (i.e., grapheme-to-phoneme mapping).ResultsBehavioral results showed that the more lexical pathways participants preferred, the better they performed on newly-acquired addressed characters relative to assembled characters. More importantly, neuroimaging results showed that participants who preferred lexical pathway in phonological access show less involvement of brain regions for addressed phonology (e.g., the bilateral orbitofrontal cortex and right pars triangularis) in the processing of newly-acquired addressed characters.ConclusionThese results indicated that phonological access via the preferred pathway required less neural resources to achieve better behavioral performance. These above results provide direct neuroimaging evidence for the influence of reading pathway preference on phonological learning.