The Visual Word Form Area: Evidence from an fMRI study of implicit processing of Chinese characters

How does interhemispheric communication in visual word recognition work? Deciding between early and late integration accounts of the split fovea theory

“…Once again, however, we failed to find evidence for late integration. We did not observe a neighbor frequency effect (e.g., Davis & Taft, 2005;Perea & Pollatsek, 1998) These data are in line with the observation in brain imaging research that a visual word form area in the occipito-temporal area of the language-dominant cerebral hemisphere becomes active in word processing irrespective of the retinal position of the word (Cai et al, 2008;Cohen et al, 2000;Liu et al, 2008;Vigneau et al, 2005). Our data strongly suggest that the processing in this word form area is indeed what determines the time needed to make a lexical decision.…”

“…Cohen et al called this area "the visual word form area" and claimed that it was the first language-specific area needed for reading orthographic stimuli. Other research confirmed the left lateralization of this visual word form area in righthanded participants, both in alphabetical languages (Vigneau, Jobard, Mazoyer, & TzourioMazoyer, 2005) and in non-alphabetical languages such as Chinese (Liu et al, 2008). Cai et al (2008) replicated this finding for participants with left frontal language dominance and, in addition, showed that the area was lateralized to the right hemisphere for participants with right frontal language dominance.…”

The reverse connectivity pattern between Broca's area and the left visual word form area in the processing of Chinese words and English characters

“…Our results provide strong evidence for VWFA in processing Chinese characters similar to that found in alphabetic scripts and hence support the hypothesis that left VWFA cooperates with Broca's area to respond to the different task demands [5].…”

Typical and Dyslexic Development in Learning to Read Chinese

“…Huang & Hanley, 1995;Ho & Bryant, 1997;Ho, Chan, Lee, Tsang, & Luan, 2004;Li, Peng, & Shu, 2006;Li, Shu, McBride-Chang, Liu, & Peng, in press) play significant roles in Chinese reading development. The brain mechanism of orthographic processing in Chinese reading were also reported in the fMRI studies (Liu, Zhang, Tang, Mai, Chen, Tardif & Luo, 2008;Tan, Liu, Perfetti, Spinks, Fox, & Gao, 2001;Wang, Yang, Shu & Zevin, 2011) The unit of interface between the written word and spoken language in Chinese is morpheme. A character corresponds with one syllable and usually represents one morpheme.…”