The Visual Word Form Area across cultures
Yi-Yuan Tang*, Wu-Tian Zhang，Chao Liu
Key Laboratory of Mental
Health,
Abstract
Chinese language has sharp
differences from alphabetic languages. A notable controversy is whether there
is a particular brain area specialized for visual word recognition within the
visual ventral stream. We addressed the issue in implicit processing of Chinese
characters. Four types of stimuli, including real characters, pseudo
characters, artificial characters, and chequerboard,
in large and small size, were compared in normal participants using fMRI with a size judgment task. The results first
demonstrated that the Visual Word Form Area (VWFA) was identified in both the
ROI analysis of three linguistic stimuli vs. Chequerboard
contrast and the inter-comparison of three linguistic stimuli as a left middle fusiform gyrus showing a stronger
activation to Real and Pseudo characters than to Artificial characters.
Moreover, an intensive individual analysis revealed that its coordinate was
highly consistent with the VWFA found in alphabetic scripts. We also found a
hierarchical brain network for implicit Chinese character processing, including
a bilateral middle occipital gyrus and occipital fusiform gyrus for visual feature
processing; a left middle fusiform gyrus, accompanied by a left middle frontal cortex for
orthographic processing; and a left middle gyrus,
left inferior and superior parietal cortex, and left inferior and middle
frontal cortex for phonological and semantic processing. Our results support
the existence of VWFA in processing Chinese characters similar to that found in
alphabetic scripts and hence are in line with the hypothesis that VWFA is
universal across different writing systems.
Reference
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Price CJ, Devlin JT. The myth of the visual word form area. Neuroimage 2003; 19: 473-481.
*Tang Yiyuan, Professor and
Director at