Cultural Constraints on Brain Development: Evidence from a Developmental Study of Visual Word Processing in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

Developmental differences in phonological and orthographic processing in Chinese were examined in 9 year olds, 11 year olds, and adults using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Rhyming and spelling judgments were made to 2-character words presented sequentially in the visual modality. The spelling task showed greater activation than the rhyming task in right superior parietal lobule and right inferior temporal gyrus, and there were developmental increases across tasks bilaterally in these regions in addition to bilateral occipital cortex, suggesting increased involvement over age on visuo-orthographic analysis. The rhyming task showed greater activation than the spelling task in left superior temporal gyrus and there were developmental decreases across tasks in this region, suggesting reduced involvement over age on phonological representations. The rhyming and spelling tasks included words with conflicting orthographic and phonological information (i.e., rhyming words spelled differently or nonrhyming words spelled similarly) or nonconflicting information. There was a developmental increase in the difference between conflicting and nonconflicting words in left inferior parietal lobule, suggesting greater engagement of systems for mapping between orthographic and phonological representations. Finally, there were developmental increases across tasks in an anterior (Broadman area [BA] 45, 46) and posterior (BA 9) left inferior frontal gyrus, suggesting greater reliance on controlled retrieval and selection of posterior lexical representations.

Writing affects the brain network of reading in Chinese: A functional magnetic resonance imaging study

“…Another accommodation may be seen in the role of the bilateral superior parietal lobules, which may support memories for the visuo-spatial configuration of components within a character. The superior parietal lobules, as well as the bilateral middle occipital gyri, show age-related increases in Chinese reading over development, suggesting a role in the acquisition of Chinese reading skill [Cao et al, 2010;Cao et al, 2009]. Finally, as we observed above, learners also showed activation in the left dorsal frontal region (BA9) that suggest an accommodation to the properties of Chinese characters that call on that region.…”

“…In our study, we observed activation during character reading near this same ''Chinese region,'' at the left dorsal inferior frontal gyrus (BA9). The peak was at (À50, 2, 34), very close to the peaks of (À48, 4, 35) and (À44, 4, 33) for learners in Nelson et al (2009) and Liu et al (2007), respectively, and to the peaks of (À48, 9, 30) and (À46, 8, 34) for native Chinese speakers in Bolger (2005) and Cao (2010), respectively. This convergence of findings suggests that English speakers can adopt the procedures of addressed retrieval of phonology and semantics after only a short period learning Chinese.…”

“…The clearest indicator for this is the greater activation in left IPL in the implicit writing task. The left IPL is associated with the mapping between orthography and phonology in Chinese [Cao et al, 2010;Tan et al, 2005a] and English [Booth et al, 2002[Booth et al, , 2003b. The left IPL involved in Chinese is more dorsal and lateral than the one involved in English, which may indicates the whole-syllable level mapping in Chinese versus the phoneme level mapping in English.…”

“…Among the common neural mechanisms, the left temporo-occipital cortex and left inferior parietal lobule (IPL) are involved in both languages for orthographic analysis and conversion between orthography and phonology/semantics, respectively [Bolger et al, 2005;Booth et al, 2006;Tan et al, 2003]. Among the distinctive mechanisms, right temporo-occipital cortex and bilateral superior parietal lobules are more involved in Chinese than English, presumably due to the complex holistic visual-spatial analysis required by Chinese characters [Cao et al, 2010;Tan et al, 2005a]. Left dorsal inferior/middle frontal gyrus (BA 9) is also more involved in Chinese than in English, which is probably associated with the retrieval of phonology at the whole syllable level and with lexical selection required by the extensive homophony in Chinese [Bolger et al, 2005;Tan et al, 2005a].…”

Universal Reading Processes Are Modulated by Language and Writing System

“…Based on developmental studies of reading in Chinese (Cao et al, 2009(Cao et al, , 2010 and in English (Booth et al, 2002), Perfetti, Cao, and Booth (2013) hypothesized distinctive developmental courses of increased specialization. In English, the superior temporal gyrus (STG), which is associated with phonological (phoneme-level) processing in alphabetic reading (Simos et al, 2000), shows increased activation with experimenter-designed phonological training (Shaywitz et al, 2004).…”