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The orthographic sensitivity to written Chinese in the occipital-temporal cortex

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Abstract

Previous studies have identified an area in the left lateral fusiform cortex that is highly responsive to written words and has been named the visual word form area (VWFA). However, there is disagreement on the specific functional role of this area in word recognition. Chinese characters, which are dramatically different from Roman alphabets in the visual form and in the form to phonological mapping, provide a unique opportunity to investigate the properties of the VWFA. Specifically, to clarify the orthographic sensitivity in the mid-fusiform cortex, we compared fMRI response amplitudes (Exp. 1) as well as the spatial patterns of response across multiple voxels (Exp. 2) between Chinese characters and stimuli derived from Chinese characters with different orthographic properties. The fMRI response amplitude results suggest the existence of orthographic sensitivity in the VWFA. The results from multi-voxel pattern analysis indicate that spatial distribution of the responses across voxels in the occipitotemporal cortex contained discriminative information between the different types of character-related stimuli. These results together suggest that the orthographic rules are likely represented in a distributed neural network with the VWFA containing the most specific information regarding a stimulus’ orthographic regularity.

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Abbreviations

VWFA:

Visual word form area

MVPA:

Multi-voxel pattern analysis

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31070905); the National Social Science Foundation of China (11AZD119); National Science Foundation of US (0818588); United States NIH (R01-EY002934); and Natural Science Foundation of Hainan Province of China (312092).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 10010, China

    Haicheng Liu, Yi Jiang, Bo Zhang, Lifei Ma & Xuchu Weng

  2. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China

    Haicheng Liu & Bo Zhang

  3. Education Science College, Hainan Normal University, Haikou, 571158, China

    Haicheng Liu

  4. Center for Cognition and Brain Disorders, The Affiliated Hospital, Hangzhou Normal University, Hangzhou, 310015, China

    Bo Zhang, Sheng He & Xuchu Weng

  5. Department of Psychology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, 55455, USA

    Sheng He

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  1. Haicheng Liu
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  2. Yi Jiang
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  3. Bo Zhang
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  4. Lifei Ma
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  5. Sheng He
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  6. Xuchu Weng
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Correspondence to Sheng He or Xuchu Weng.

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Liu, H., Jiang, Y., Zhang, B. et al. The orthographic sensitivity to written Chinese in the occipital-temporal cortex. Exp Brain Res 227, 387–396 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-013-3518-0

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