A fMRI Study of Word Recognition in Chinese and Korean

Lee, Donghoon; Lee, Hongjae; Lee, Eunjung; Moon, Chanhong; Ryu, Jaeook; Na, Donggue; Nam, Kichun

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Commun Sci Disord. 2001;6(1): 1-25.

Donghoon Lee^` , Hongjae Lee^` , Eunjung Lee^` , Chanhong Moon^` , Jaeook Ryu^` , Donggue Na^` , and Kichun Nam^`

ABSTRACT

The depth of or thogr aphy between Chines e and Kor ean is differ ent . It has been r eported in ps ycholinguis tic r es ear ch that the differ ence in wor d r ecognition proces s is due to the differ ence in the depth of or thogr aphy. Kor ean , which has a shallow depth of orthogr aphy , us e both lexical and phonological r outes ; however , Chines e char acters depend exclus ively on the lexical route . In this r es ear ch , we inves tigated whether the differ ence in wor d r ecognition pr oces s caus e any differ ence in the br ain activation r egion us ing fMRI. In Exper iment 1, we gave Kor ean - r eading task and chines e - r eading task one after the other for s ever al times to find out the br ain activation ar ea by compar ing the activation r ate . We found that the SMG (s upr amarginal gyrus ) r egion of the br ain , which is r epor ted to execute phonological pr oces s es , was mor e activated for the Kor ean r eading task than for the Chines e r eading task . However , the Br oca s Ar ea(BA 44) and the fus iform gyrus wer e mor e activated when executing Chines e r eading task . In Exper iment 2, we us ed a s tatis tical s ubtr action method to inves tigate the differ ences in the activating r egions between the two languages . The r es ults showed that the activated r egions wer e s imilar in Kor ean and Chines e , but a tr emendous decr eas e was found in the activating s ignals . We wer e thus able to dr aw a conclus ion that , despite the differ ence in the activating br ain r egions between the two languages , we cannot definitively s ay that the two languages us e differ ent r outes.