Chinese

Citations: Wang et al., 2019 in Neuropsychologia (see original paper).

Findings:

Using a priming paradigm with phonological and semantic priming conditions, we studied whether Chinese adult readers showed top-down phonological or semantic influence in the activation of vOT, a classic orthographic representation area, during a visual lexical decision task on target characters. We used the psychophysiological interaction (PPI) approach to analyze which area functionally connected with vOT that modulated its activation. The prime characters were presented 150ms with a post-mask to ensure no conscious processing of prime conditions. We observed a significant top-down semantic but not phonological effect in the brain activation of the left vOT during Chinese character recognition. Additionally, we found that the left vIFG, a classic semantic region in literature, was the region that connected with vOT during the semantic condition to modulate its activation. These findings together suggest a stronger connection between orthographic and semantic representations in Chinese word reading. This is different from alphabetic languages, which rely heavily on orthographic-to-phonological mapping, suggesting the importance of considering cross-linguistic differences in reading theories and practices.

Because the brain exhibits stronger automatic connectivity between orthographic and semantic—rather than phonological—representation regions during Chinese character recognition, reading instruction in Chinese should emphasize the connection between spelling and meaning to support the development of word recognition skills.

Citations: Cao, Yan, Wang, Liu, Wang et al., 2017 in NeuroImage (see original paper).

Findings:

Using an auditory rhyming judgment task, we found that 11-year-old Chinese children with developmental dyslexia (DD) showed reduced activation in the left dorsal inferior frontal gyrus (dIFG) and weaker functional connectivity between the left superior temporal gyrus (STG) and the ventral occipitotemporal cortex (vOT), compared with both age-matched controls and reading-level–matched 9-year-old controls. The reduced activation in the left dIFG suggests less efficient phonological access in children with dyslexia, whereas the weaker STG–vOT connectivity indicates a diminished automatic mapping between phonological and orthographic representations. Together, these findings suggest that Chinese children with dyslexia exhibit phonological network deficits similar to those observed in speakers of English and other alphabetic languages, where phonological processing is recognized as a core impairment.

Phonological instruction should remain as a key intervention for Chinese children with dyslexia, even though Chinese is a logographic language that relies more heavily on orthographic-to-semantic mapping than alphabetic languages.