The Neural Mechanism Of The Interaction Of Phonetic And Semantic Information In Chinese Character Reading

Current models of visual word reading differ in their architectural,representational,and processing assumptions.There is,however,a general agreement that there exists an interaction between phonological and semantic processing involved in the computation from orrthography to phonology.The main evidences are from studies in alphabetic languages(e.g.English).The writing properties of alphabetic words have a weakness that its mapping from orthography to meaning is arbitrary.Thus,the neural mechanism underlying the interaction between phonological and semantic processing is far from clear.Taking advantage of the Chinese writing system,the current study addressed this issue by manipulated the phonetic consistency and the semantic properties,the whole character's imageability or sub-lexical semantic transparency to revealed the interaction between the semantic and phonological processing during the Chinese characters reading.The study 1 behavioral results observed a significant main effect of the phonetic consistency and imageability effect.However,there was no significant interaction between the consistency and the imageablity effects.Brain imaging results showed that the activation of imageability effect under the condition of high consistency mainly included left fusiform gyrus,inferior frontal gyrus and angular gyrus;the activation brain regions of imageability effect under the low consistency mainly included left fusiform gyrus,inferior frontal gyrus,posterior superior temporal gyrus and precuneus.The study 2 behavioral results found the significant interaction between the consistency and the transparency effects.The brain regions activated by transparency effect under the high consistency was mainly included the left middle frontal gyrus,insula and cingulate gyrus;the transparency effect under the low consistency was mainly located the left fusiform gyrus,the inferior frontal gyrus,the posterior superior temporal gyrus and the angular gyrus.The current findings revealed that Chinese character reading is influenced by both phonological and the semantic processing.Based on the results of the behavioral study,fMRI found there was an interaction between the semantic neural route(AG?ATL)and the phonological neural route(FG?IFG?pSTG)as the vocabulary attributes change.From a cross-language perspective,the study clarifies the division of labor for the reading neural circuits,and provide a direct evidence for the neurophysiologicalmodel of visual word reading.