Читать книгу The Science of Reading - Группа авторов - Страница 32

A universal brain reading network is strongly predicted by the fundamental principle of reading: that it converts systematic visual input (structured by writing systems) into language‐mediated meaning. Early comparisons confirmed this prediction across alphabetic languages, while also showing variation of the reading network in relation to consistency of letter‐phoneme mappings. English reading showed more use of a ventral pathway that includes the inferior temporal gyrus (IFG) compared with the more consistent Italian (Paulesu et al., 2000) and Spanish (Jamal et al., 2012). However, testing universality requires comparisons beyond alphabetic systems, and Chinese provides a high‐contrast comparison with alphabetic reading.

Early neuroimaging studies of reading Chinese produced evidence for both a universal network and writing‐system specific variations (Bolger et al., 2005; Tan et al., 2005), as does a more recent review (Xu et al., 2019). Universal areas include the left fusiform gyrus, highlighting its function in coding orthography regardless of the visual forms and mapping levels. However, Chinese shows more bilateral activation in posterior areas that support visual‐orthographic processing and a less prominent role in some (but not all) studies for the inferior frontal gyrus. Another difference is the more prominent role of the left middle frontal gyrus (LMFG) in Chinese. The LMFG’s location near a motor area involved in handwriting (Exner’s area) suggests that its prominence in Chinese reading reflects an effect of character writing on character reading, consistent with the importance of writing practice in Chinese literacy instruction. Evidence for this comes from greater overlap of passive recognition and imagined writing in the LMFG for Chinese than for English (Cao & Perfetti, 2017). The greater writing practice in learning to read Chinese may help secure long‐term orthographic memories for characters, consistent with conclusions from behavioral research (McBride‐Chang, Chung et al., 2011). Although writing seems especially important in Chinese reading, a study by Nakamura et al. (2012) comparing French and Chinese on recognizing handwriting suggested the writing‐reading role of the LMFG is shared across writing systems.

The significance and robustness of these Chinese‐alphabetic differences across different word reading paradigms remains an issue. In comparing meaning judgments made to speech and print, Rueckl et al. (2015) found the shared areas of print‐speech convergence across English, Spanish, Hebrew, and Chinese. These results affirm the universal connection of reading with spoken language. However, the brain networks for reading also reflect experience‐based accommodations to the orthography‐language connections required by the writing system (Cao et al., 2015).