NeuroImage
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Review Meta Analysis
A meta-analysis of fMRI studies on Chinese orthographic, phonological, and semantic processing.
A growing body of neuroimaging evidence has shown that Chinese character processing recruits differential activation from alphabetic languages due to its unique linguistic features. As more investigations on Chinese character processing have recently become available, we applied a meta-analytic approach to summarize previous findings and examined the neural networks for orthographic, phonological, and semantic processing of Chinese characters independently. The activation likelihood estimation (ALE) method was used to analyze eight studies in the orthographic task category, eleven in the phonological and fifteen in the semantic task categories. ⋯ Functional dissociation was identified in the left inferior frontal gyrus, with the posterior dorsal part for phonological processing and the anterior ventral part for semantic processing. Moreover, bilateral involvement of the ventral occipito-temporal regions was found for both phonological and semantic processing. The results provide better understanding of the neural networks underlying Chinese orthographic, phonological, and semantic processing, and consolidate the findings of additional recruitment of the left middle frontal gyrus and the right fusiform gyrus for Chinese character processing as compared with the universal language network that has been based on alphabetic languages.
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The brain is organized into a set of widely distributed networks. Therefore, although structural damage from stroke is focal, remote dysfunction can occur in regions connected to the area of lesion. Historically, neuroscience has focused on local processing due in part to the absence of tools to study the function of distributed networks. ⋯ Early results suggest that disruption of inter-hemispheric connectivity in the somatomotor network and the dorsal attention network is more strongly associated with behavioral impairment in those domains than is intra-hemispheric connectivity within either the lesioned or unaffected hemisphere. We also observe in the somatomotor network an interesting interaction between corticospinal tract damage and decreased inter-hemispheric connectivity that suggests that both processes combine to contribute to neuromotor impairment after stroke. A connectivity-based approach will provide greater insight into network reorganization in the acute and chronic phases after stroke and will contribute to improving prognostic ability and the development of therapeutic interventions.