A cross-linguistic evaluation of script-specific effects on fMRI lateralization in late second language readers

Koyama, Maki; Stein, John; Stoodley, Catherine J.; Hansen, P.

doi:10.3389/fnhum.2014.00249

Cited by 9 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 43 publications

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“…Still several authors found, at the group level, that Chinese/Japanese character recognition induces slightly more right-lateralized VOTC activations than alphabetical reading (e.g. Bolger et al, 2005; Feng et al, 2020; Koyama et al, 2014; Qu et al, 2019; Szwed et al, 2014; Tan et al, 2001). We did not find such rightward bias, possibly because our participants were native Chinese speakers, while the rightward bias may be specific to logographic scripts acquired as a second language (for a review see Cao, 2016).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Does the visual word form area split in bilingual readers? A millimeter-scale 7T fMRI study

Zhan

Pallier

Dehaene

et al. 2022

Preprint

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In expert readers, a brain region known as the visual word form area (VWFA) is highly sensitive to written words, exhibiting a posterior-to-anterior gradient of increasing sensitivity to orthographic stimuli whose statistics match those of real words. Using high-resolution 7T fMRI, we ask whether, in bilingual readers, distinct cortical patches specialize for different languages. In 21 English-French bilinguals, unsmoothed 1.2 mm fMRI revealed that the VWFA is actually composed of several small cortical patches highly selective for reading, with a posterior-to-anterior word similarity gradient, but with near-complete overlap between the two languages. In 10 English-Chinese bilinguals, however, while most word-specific patches exhibited similar reading specificity and word-similarity gradients for reading in Chinese and English, additional patches responded specifically to Chinese writing and, surprisingly, to faces. Our results show that the acquisition of multiple writing systems can indeed tune the visual cortex differently in bilinguals, sometimes leading to the emergence of cortical patches specialized for a single language.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Does the visual word form area split in bilingual readers? A millimeter-scale 7T fMRI study

Zhan

Pallier

Dehaene

et al. 2022

Preprint

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“…Their findings suggest inter-hemispheric cooperation is less likely to emerge during pre-lexical (perceptual) and/or post-lexical (decisionmaking) processing, but mainly occurred during lexical semantic processing when the semantic information was shared between hemispheres. Koyama et al (2014) tested whether left-lateralized fMRI activations for reading differ between first (L1) and second (L2) languages in bilingual L2 readers. They asked late L2 learners to perform a visual one-back matching task either in English or Japanese.…”

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confidence: 99%

What makes written words so special to the brain

2015

Frontiers Research Topics

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Reading is an integral part of life in today's information-driven societies. How the human brain sees and processes words is the focus of this ebook. It includes a collection of 22 papers that illustrate current issues in the neurobiology and psychophysics of word processing. Using varieties of behavioral tests and neuroimaging techniques, they investigated word processing mechanisms across different alphabetic and logographic writing systems, such as English, Chinese, Arabic, Japanese, French or German. Each paper provides useful literature reviews, methodological developments and a host of novel findings that will inspire future investigations into the neural systems that support reading.Several behavioral, fMRI and ERP studies investigated how word-likeness modulated the underlying cognitive and neural processing. The fMRI studies focused on many regions of the reading system, in particular a region in the left ventral occipitotemporal cortex known as the visual word form area (VWFA), whereas the ERP studies featured prominently the N1/N170 component around 200 ms post-stimulus. Participants were mainly healthy skilled readers, although a few studies have also looked at reading in dyslexic, autistic, or congenitally deaf subjects. Ludersdorfer et al. (2013) investigated how the VWFA responds to visual and auditory stimuli that differed in their word-likeness. VWFA activation decreased for visual stimuli from false-fonts over pseudowords to words, presumably reflecting more efficient processing of familiar words. In contrast, auditory stimuli lead to a general deactivation in visual areas for all stimuli, except for the VWFA where deactivation was spared for word and pseudoword stimuli, presumably due to modulation by linguistic information. Deng et al. (2013) used two cross-modal tasks, phonological retrieval of visual words and orthographic retrieval of auditory words, to examine the unimodal and multimodal regions for logographic language processing. The VWFA responded exclusively to visual inputs, whereas an adjacent region in the left inferior temporal gyrus showed comparable activation for both visual and auditory inputs. A role of the VWFA in integrating visual and auditory processes is also suggested by McNorgan et al. (2013) who reported correlations between a behavioral phonemic awareness task (phoneme elision) and neural activation in an audiovisual condition in typically developing children. No such correlations were found in children with reading disability, nor in any of the groups for unimodal stimuli.Using ERP, an inverse word-like effect was also found for single letters by Herdman and Takai (2013), who reported an increased and delayed N1 for pseudoletters than letters, which was not modulated by attention. As studies using entire words typically report a reversed effect, this may suggest that processing single letters differs from processing letter strings and that early orthographic processing of letters is largely automatic. Hasko et al. (2013) not only showed a positive word-like effect i...

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“…Their findings suggest inter-hemispheric cooperation is less likely to emerge during pre-lexical (perceptual) and/or post-lexical (decision-making) processing, but mainly occurred during lexical semantic processing when the semantic information was shared between hemispheres. Koyama et al ( 2014 ) tested whether left-lateralized fMRI activations for reading differ between first (L1) and second (L2) languages in bilingual L2 readers. They asked late L2 learners to perform a visual one-back matching task either in English or Japanese.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%