Exploring task demand effect on stroke-motor representations of Chinese characters in reading
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1
Rice University, United States
Knowledge about how Chinese characters are written has been argued to play a particularly important role in reading due to the emphasis in repeated copying/handwriting when children learn to read Chinese. Neuroimaging studies have also supported the notion that the writing system is engaged when Chinese is read (e.g. Siok et al., 2004). However, the strongest version of this hypothesis, that reading depends on writing in Chinese, has been falsified by a case study of a patient with acquired aphasia who lost the ability to write Chinese characters without an impairment in reading (Bi et al., 2009). Moreover, a recent behavioral study argued against a weaker version of the hypothesis, indicating that knowledge of how Chinese characters are written have no influence on visual character processing in skilled readers (Zhai & Fischer-Baum, 2019). One possible reason for this discrepancy is that the findings that some of the tasks used in previous studies may direct participants’ attention to the stroke-motor information of the Chinese characters, which could result in a different cognitive process other than in normal reading. In the present study, we asked 12 native Chinese speakers to read and perform 1-back tasks towards a list of Chinese characters in the fMRI scanner. The same set of Chinese characters appeared in four different task contexts, each task taps into one of the levels of representations of Chinese characters: In the visual task, the participants were asked to judge whether two successive characters are physically identical; the phonological task required participants to judge whether two successive characters rhyme with each other; in semantic task, they are asked to judge whether two characters belong to the same category; the stroke-motor task asked readers to judge whether the ending strokes of two successive Chinese characters are identical. The univariate fMRI results showed that Exner’s area, a brain region has been argued to be associated with motor processing specific for writing, was involved in visual, phonological, and stroke-motor tasks, but not in the semantic task, suggesting that Exner’s area is at least not a necessary component for reading process intended to extract meanings of Chinese characters. To verify whether stroke-motor information is actually processed in Exner’s area under different test conditions, a neural decoding method, representational similarity analysis, will be applied and is expected to be completed before the conference. By looking at the neural response patterns in VWFA to same set of characters in different reading tasks, we also aim to answer a broader question of how task demand influence the way brain represents Chinese characters.
References
Bi, Y., Han, Z., & Zhang, Y. (2009). Reading does not depend on writing, even in Chinese. Neuropsychologia, 47(4), 1193-1199.
Siok, W. T., Perfetti, C. A., Jin, Z., & Tan, L. H. (2004). Biological abnormality of impaired reading is constrained by culture. Nature, 431(7004), 71.
Zhai, M., & Fischer-Baum, S. (2019). Exploring the effects of knowledge of writing on reading Chinese characters in skilled readers. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 45, 724-731.
Keywords:
reading,
Writing,
Chinese character (Hanzi) recognition,
task effect,
Representational Similarity Analyses
Conference:
Academy of Aphasia 57th Annual Meeting, Macau, Macao, SAR China, 27 Oct - 29 Oct, 2019.
Presentation Type:
Poster presentation
Topic:
Eligible for student award
Citation:
Zhai
M and
Fischer-Baum
S
(2019). Exploring task demand effect on stroke-motor representations of Chinese characters in reading.
Front. Hum. Neurosci.
Conference Abstract:
Academy of Aphasia 57th Annual Meeting.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2019.01.00017
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Received:
28 Apr 2019;
Published Online:
09 Oct 2019.
*
Correspondence:
Mx. Mingjun Zhai, Rice University, Houston, United States, minnazhai@gmail.com