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Prominent activation of the bilateral inferior parietal lobule of literate compared with illiterate subjects during Chinese logographic processing

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Abstract

Chinese is a logographic language system that differs from alphabetic languages, and some of the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying Chinese logographic reading also differ from those underlying alphabetic word reading. However, whether education level effects the neural activation associated with logographic processing of Chinese is still unknown. In the present study, 11 Chinese illiterate and 11 literate (age-matched) subjects participated in an event-related fMRI experiment with Chinese character discrimination (CD) and figure discrimination (FD) tasks. All subjects were asked to view the character or figure pairs and discriminate whether the characters or figures of each stimuli pair were the same or not using response keys. Both literate and illiterate subjects activated a widely distributed cerebral network, including the bilateral inferior, middle and superior frontal gyri, superior temporal gyrus and parietal lobe, in the CD task. Finally, we directly compared the activations of literate subjects with illiterate subjects. The results suggest that the bilateral parts of the angular gyrus and supramarginal gyrus are more active for literate than illiterate subjects in the CD task. We found no significant group difference in the FD task. Therefore, the present results may indicate that education level effects the neural activation associated with the logographic processing of Chinese.

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Acknowledgments

A portion of this study was supported by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B) (21404002, Japan), the AA Science Platform Program of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. The authors would like to thank the people who participated in this study and the staff of the Shengyang Shengjing Hospital of the China Medical College for their assistance with data collection.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Biomedical Engineering Laboratory, The Graduate School of Natural Science and Technology, Okayama University, Okayama, Japan

    Jinglong Wu, Xiujun Li & Jiajia Yang

  2. Department of Rehabilitation for Sensory Functions, Research Institute of National Rehabilitation Center for Persons with Disabilities, Saitama, Japan

    Chang Cai

  3. Department of Radiology, Shengjing Hospital of China Medical University, Shenyang, China

    Hongzan Sun & Qiyong Guo

  4. The School of Computer Science and Technology, Changchun University of Science and Technology, Changchun, China

    Xiujun Li

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  1. Jinglong Wu
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  2. Xiujun Li
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  4. Chang Cai
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  5. Hongzan Sun
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Correspondence to Jinglong Wu or Qiyong Guo.

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Wu, J., Li, X., Yang, J. et al. Prominent activation of the bilateral inferior parietal lobule of literate compared with illiterate subjects during Chinese logographic processing. Exp Brain Res 219, 327–337 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-012-3094-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-012-3094-8

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