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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access published online on September 22, 2009
Cerebral Cortex, doi:10.1093/cercor/bhp186
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© 2009 The Authors
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Cultural Constraints on Brain Development: Evidence from a Developmental Study of Visual Word Processing in Mandarin Chinese

Fan Cao1, Rebecca Lee1, Hua Shu2, Yanhui Yang3, Guoqing Xu2, Kuncheng Li3 and James R. Booth1

1 Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60201, USA, 2 State Key Lab of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China, 3 Department of Radiology, Xuanwu Hospital, Beijing 100053, China

Address correspondence to Dr. Fan Cao, Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Northwestern University, 2240 Campus Drive, Evanston, IL 60208, USA. Email: f-cao{at}northwestern.edu.

Developmental differences in phonological and orthographic processing in Chinese were examined in 9 year olds, 11 year olds, and adults using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Rhyming and spelling judgments were made to 2-character words presented sequentially in the visual modality. The spelling task showed greater activation than the rhyming task in right superior parietal lobule and right inferior temporal gyrus, and there were developmental increases across tasks bilaterally in these regions in addition to bilateral occipital cortex, suggesting increased involvement over age on visuo-orthographic analysis. The rhyming task showed greater activation than the spelling task in left superior temporal gyrus and there were developmental decreases across tasks in this region, suggesting reduced involvement over age on phonological representations. The rhyming and spelling tasks included words with conflicting orthographic and phonological information (i.e., rhyming words spelled differently or nonrhyming words spelled similarly) or nonconflicting information. There was a developmental increase in the difference between conflicting and nonconflicting words in left inferior parietal lobule, suggesting greater engagement of systems for mapping between orthographic and phonological representations. Finally, there were developmental increases across tasks in an anterior (Broadman area [BA] 45, 46) and posterior (BA 9) left inferior frontal gyrus, suggesting greater reliance on controlled retrieval and selection of posterior lexical representations.

Key Words: Chinese • development • rhyming • spelling


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